Heroes' Return
by stalkeryik
Summary: The year is 1997, and as Harry Potter returns to school, Voldemort's reach extends beyond the wizarding world--into the Muggles'. Now Harry must step into the breach. Yet soon he finds that he is not the only hero in the world...
1. A Meeting

_Disclaimer:  The characters and settings appearing herein are not the property of the author, but of their original creators.  The characters from Harry Potter belong to Ms. J.K. Rowling.  All others mentioned belong to their respective owners, excepting those who have passed into the public domain._

            Under normal circumstances, Albus Dumbledore, headmaster of Hogwarts, Order of Merlin, First Class, and too many other titles for even him to remember, would not have received a Muggle in his well-appointed office, down a secret passage concealed behind a gargoyle decorating one of the many hallways in his school.  Then again, the circumstances at the time could hardly be called normal, nor was his visitor exactly one of the more ordinary representatives of the non-magical folk.

            "My dear Holmes," the great magician greeted the man standing across the desk from him.  "What a pleasure to see you again—though it might seem that your visit, unfortunately, must be motivated by more than the simple desire to chat with an old friend."

            The visitor raised a quizzical eyebrow as he shook the professor's outstretched hand.  "Why, yes.  May I assume from your deduction that you have been making a study of my methods?"

            The headmaster's smile broadened.  "Of course!" he replied.  "Though, I must admit, having known you for as long as I have, I have had not inconsiderable practice in interpreting the various clues about your person.  You came in here with a spring in your step and a twinkle in your eye—the same ones you get whenever, as you say, 'the game's afoot'.  Therefore, old friend, you are at work again.  The British government has need of it's most illustrious subject once more."  He leaned back, smiling at his deduction.

            The visitor cocked his head, regarding his host with a quizzical eye.  Slowly, he began to nod.  Then, Sherlock Holmes, the man who for one hundred and fifty years had been, and still was, the greatest detective on the face of the planet, laughed.

            "Good old Dumbledore!" he cried.  "Your talent for reading a man remains strong; I thought that, as I came in, I had the external manifestations of the excitement I felt at working with an old colleague again under control."  He chuckled.  "Only you, old friend, could have picked up on those subtle, non-verbal cues as well as I.  I salute you!"  He raised his pipe, matching action to words.

            "Seriously," he continued, his face now sober, "I _have been sent by her Majesty's government to help deal with your little conflict with the Dark Lord.  There is reason to believe, old friend, that the conflict now brewing within the wizarding world is but a small strand in a monstrous web of evil that even now threatens to ensnare us all.  The Dark Lord may have found allies in the most unlikely of places.  Decades-long conspiracies are even now coming to fruition, and they all of them have need of resources that others possess.  It is not inconceivable to think that two or more groups may ally each in the hope of exploiting the resources of the others in order to accomplish their aims.  They are subtle, and sly, Dumbledore.  Whatever links there may be between these secret agencies, you can be sure, old friend, they will be well hidden.  The British government apparently believes that what small talent I possess would be best employed in tracking down such alliances, if indeed the Dark Lord has forged any.  I intend to do my best."_

            Dumbledore smiled.  "We wouldn't expect anything less from you," he complimented his friend.  They had first met years before, a young Auror and a neophyte private detective still attempting to establish his reputation as a solver of cases, collaborating to bring to justice a mysterious killer who was then cutting a bloody swath through London high society, both wizard and muggle, first kidnapping his victims and then leaving their bodies, drained of blood after horrendous tortures, in prominent places.  Working together, they had tracked the killer to his lair in an abandoned railway culvert.  There, though they barely escaped with their lives, they had succeeded in preventing the notorious vampire William the Bloody from continuing his black-handed reign of terror over London town.

            Over the years, they had worked together on several other cases, most of which, though being recorded by Holmes' friend and chronicler Doctor Watson, passed totally unnoticed by the public at large.  It was a relationship that, for both men, had lasted far longer than initially anticipated.  Holmes had, through intense experimentation, created an immortality elixir from the royal jelly of honeybees, and thus found himself, at the close of the twentieth century, standing beside his old comrade in arms, both having lived already twice the normal span of men, and neither having shown signs of slowing down.

            The great wizard sighed.  "To tell you the truth, old friend, of late the Dark Lord has been getting bolder in his attacks.  The worst was last week.  A squad of his Death Eaters apparated right into the middle of Diagon Alley.  There…was bloodshed.  They cast destructive and death spells into the crowd at random, not seeming to care what they shot at.  Thirty people were killed.  Many shops along the street were destroyed, including Ollivander's.  By the time the Aurors got there, it was too late."  He looked at the detective with tired eyes in a face that now seemed to show all of its one hundred and fifty years.  "They left the Dark Mark behind them, floating above the rooftops.  The wretched thing was visible from outside the alley."

            "Which would mean that the population at large now knows that something happened," opined Holmes.  "Though I would assume that, lacking further information, the nature of that occurrence would remain a mystery."

            Dumbledore nodded.  "Yes," he said, "but ambiguous or not, by this sign he has announced his presence to the world at large.  I fear what this means.  He has grown strong enough—or at least he believes that he has—to challenge the governments of the world, both magical and mundane, to battle."  He sighed.  "We were not expecting this.  He has grown more powerful than we could have ever thought possible in such a short time.  We cannot stand against him, Holmes.  Not on our own.  Tell that to the government.  Tell them to mobilize what resources they can: their soldiers and ships and their airplanes and what super-people they can find.  We are all in this now, for better or for worse."  The old man rubbed his eyes once more, then took up his cup and drank some of his tea.  He smiled, tiredly.  "God knows, it will be a relief to end this mummer's farce.  Despite what some people think, we are a part of humanity at large.  We ought to walk openly among our fellow-men, not skulk in shadows like a thief with something to hide.  Besides, if society can accept a woman made out of electricity, surely people who can do things just by waving wands will not be so strange, after all."

            Holmes smiled.  "Ah," he said, "the divine Ms. Sparks.  The woman has an aura about her, that attracts those who in other circumstances would be afraid of her.  She could rally the peoples of the earth to whatever cause she chose, should she wish to."  He bowed his head, puffing on his pipe as he did so.  "A pity she has withdrawn herself from the world.  That disgraceful incident with the dead babies ought never to have happened at all.  It broke her spirit, and the world has paid the price ever since.  You know, Dumbledore, it was theorized by one Wells, a member of our little society, that she is in fact the incarnate form of the collective consciousness of all humankind, her abilities and personality being forming, and being formed by, the zeitgeist of the current age.  'The Spirit of the Twentieth Century,' he called her."  He had a faraway look in his eyes.  "Yet," he murmured, "if the spirit is broken, what hope is there for the Twentieth Century?"  His fingers closed around the bowl of his pipe, squeezing it until the knuckles turned white with the effort.

            Then, he looked up, took a deep breath, and stared his friend straight in the eye.  "No," he said.  "You and I, Dumbledore, Nemo and McLeod, Masaki and Cranston and all the rest; we will _not_ _give in_.  How long has it been, old friend?  A hundred years?  A hundred and twenty?  We have spent too much time watching over humanity in the darkness to see it go spiraling down to the abyss."  His voice sank to a whisper.  "Come what may, old friend, _we will find a way_.  This I swear."

            The aged wizard regarded his long-time friend, and it seemed to him as if a flame had kindled anew in those piercing gray eyes.  "Agreed," he said, hesitantly.  This was not the Holmes he knew, cerebral, unemotional, yet utterly and unerringly focused upon his goals.  This was a man who seemed as if he'd peered into a monstrous darkness—and had seen the darkness peer back.  Something had frightened him—him who had faced down Moriarty and Fantomas and Doctor Nikola—faced these formidable men and triumphed.  Dumbledore found himself beginning to worry.  Whatever could frighten the great detective could, potentially, be truly monstrous indeed.

There was a long, awkward pause.  Then, Holmes sat up, took a deep breath, and laughed—and the intensity of the moment before seemed to dissipate like the morning mist.

            "My apologies, old friend," he said.  "Do I seem strange to you today?  Unusually grim?  With reason, old friend, with reason.  I have just received intelligence that the threat we face may be even greater than Her Majesty's government suspects.  For all we know, _they_ may have their fingers entwined even now in the workings of the governments of the world.  They are _terrible_, Dumbledore, terrible and utterly evil."

            "And who are _they_, Holmes?" asked Dumbledore

            He paused to draw upon his pipe.  "A group of—I cannot call them people, for no person would willingly commit such acts as I have seen of them.  I learned of them when I recently received a visit from an old student of mine.  Elijah Snow."

            "The writer of the Planetary Guide?"

            "The same.  He came to me with a tale of four adventurers involved in a secret American space initiative during the Nineteen-Sixties.  Apparently, these four were to be the secret crew of a moon rocket, to be launched in Nineteen Sixty-Three."  He met the other man's gaze steadily.  "I don't need to tell you that this was six years before Mr. Armstrong's own first steps upon the selenic plain were recorded for posterity."  The Great Detective's piercing gray eyes flashed as he spoke.  He took a deep breath.  "The vessel never arrived at its destination.  According to the mission records, halfway to their destination, the ship encountered an…anomaly, a region of space in which laws of nature distorted beyond all recognition.

            "No one knows what happened thereafter, but when they returned to Earth, their craft having flung itself, out of control, around the moon, it was found that the Four were now no longer human."

            Holmes looked somberly at the wizard.  His thin hands clenched, even more tightly, around the pipe-bowl.  It was clear to Dumbledore that the detective was in the grip of some strong emotion, and was even now struggling to master it.  At length, the detective spoke.

            "The record of their subsequent deeds is not a pleasant one, Dumbledore.  Nor were their doings before that fateful spaceflight any less black.  I was shown pictures by young Snow of a giant American science-city, deep in the Arizona desert.  They performed experiments there—turning people, men and women both, into twisted, half-mad monstrosities, molding human flesh and blood as if it were clay."  He shuddered.  "I had only fragmentary evidence to go by, but from what I was shown…Dumbledore, even the worst excesses of the Nazis during the war seem mild compared to it."

            "But surely there were those who opposed it," said Dumbledore.  "Where did they come from, these unfortunate men and women whom these…_people_ performed such things on?"

            Holmes shrugged.  "Here and there, taken off the streets of the cities of that great continental power.  That was a dark time, Dumbledore.  The fear of Communism lay heavy on the minds of many patriotic Americans.  No one would miss a few suspected subversives.  And America has ever been adept at concealing the less savory activities of its government from the populace at large."

            The aged magician sighed.  "And after the expedition?  What then?"

            "Then?" the detective asked.  "Then they went mad with power.  If their deeds prior to their ascension were horrendous indeed, their actions after the incident go far beyond the pale of anything remotely recognizable as humanity.  The records brought to me by young snow told a tale of beings mad with power, of genocides and tortures conducted for the pettiest of reasons.  Do you remember, old friend, the fate of the Vril-Ya race, back in 1974?"

            Albus Dumbledore took a deep breath.  "No," he whispered, incredulously. "Holmes, what are you saying?  That this…Group of Four were the ones responsible for _that_?  That they killed the Vril-Ya?"

The Great Detective nodded.  "Yes."

            The Vril-Ya had been a great subterranean race, occupying caverns below the great coal mines of Newcastle.  They were tall and winged, with red skin and black eyes, capable of channeling a mysterious force called _vril_.  They used this _vril_ to heal, as well as, when necessary, to project bolts of incredible force to defend themselves.  For a time after their discovery, over a hundred years before, tensions had run high between the humans and the underground-dwellers, culminating in the sealing-up of the entire civilization behind an immense cave-in.  Slowly, relations between the two races had calmed, and just after the Second World War, the British government had begun establishing tentative contacts with their underground counterparts.  Though members of each race had not yet been able to walk openly in the cities of the other, an entente of a sort had grown up, though it was felt that the human population was still too panicky, especially after a world war, for the existence of the Vril-Ya to be disclosed.  Still, there were optimists on both sides who believed that this, too, would pass.

            They never had a chance to be proven right.  In 1974, all communication from the underground kingdom ceased, abruptly and utterly.  After a few, panicked months, an expedition had been sent by the government to ascertain the fate of the subterranean race.

            Dumbledore had not been a member of the party—but he had read the expedition's report.  The explorers had discovered, to their horror, the entire race of the Vril-Ya, slaughtered within their caves.  It had been obvious, from the way some of the bodies lay, that each and every one had died in great pain.  Several had been dissected alive, their very organs removed as they lay struggling and pinioned.  Some of the women had been violated, their very insides burst asunder by the force of the deed.  The caverns bore signs of a mighty struggle; the walls were scarred by _vril_-blasts and scorched by an impossible heat.  A great many buildings within the underground cities had been blown down by the force of the conflict, reduced to nothing more than lumps of gravel-sized rubble.

            The expedition, which had comprised two members of MI5 renowned for their expertise in matters strange, as well as the mysterious adventurer known only as the Doctor and a respected aviator whose flying career and experience with paranormal activities dated back to well before the First World War, had reported that a great proportion of the carnage had seemed to have been committed purely for its own sake, like a child plays with a magnifying glass and a nest of ants under the sun.

            The report had sent the wizarding world into a panic.  The star of Voldemort was rising, it was feared by many that the destruction of the Vril-Ya was the signal for the commencement in earnest of the madman's twisted war on humanity.  Yet nothing had come of it, and the Dark Lord had remained in hiding for several years more, building his forces for the coming conflict.  It soon turned out that, powerful though Voldemort was, not even he, marshalling all of his forces, could have overcome the Vril-Ya.  The initial panic soon died away, lost among other, more pressing concerns, and the massacre of the Vril-Ya simply became yet another of those mysteries of the Nether Depths, of which there were many others, though none so horrifying.

            This news of Holmes, however, seemed to put a different light on the matter.  The Vril-Ya had been a powerful race; had it come to a contest of might against might between the two worlds, Dumbledore was not sure that the surface dwellers could have stood against the underworld onslaught.  Yet these powerful, beautiful beings had been slaughtered in their caverns, almost effortlessly, in almost the same way in which a man squashes a fly.  The worst thing, Dumbledore thought, was that the Vril-Ya, despite their initial hostility, were not a violent race.  For all their power, they were a peaceful folk; they would not have lifted a finger to destroy even the smallest of insects.  Yet some one, some mysterious organization or alliance, had seen fit to invade their very homes, seemingly on a whim; to destroy the entire underground civilization, cast its many intellectual and aesthetic creations into a fire so as to be consumed, and plunder it of its technological wonders for the fulfillment of who new what dark purpose.  The old man felt a thrill run through him as he considered his old friend's words.  The Vril-Ya had been powerful, true, yet if his friend was right, they had been destroyed by just four people.

            The aged magician shook his head, as if not wanting to believe that such beings could exist, that such power could be concentrated in four individuals.  In the circles in which he moved, it was true, there were whispers of powerful beings who were said to indeed possess such power, though rarely was there solid evidence concerning their existence.  To hear someone whose word he trusted swear that they were real—that there were indeed men and women with planet-destroying power walking about under the sun—it frightened him.  Yet he knew it to be true.  Holmes would never have come to him otherwise.

            He stroked his beard, running his fingers through the luxuriant silver strands as he did so.  After thinking a while, he finally said, "Then all is lost, I suppose.  If they are truly as powerful as you say—"

            "We will still try."

            "I know.  We will try our best to resist them."  In the cage beside the headmaster's desk, Fawkes, Dumbledore's pet phoenix, awoke.  The fiery bird hopped along its perch, perhaps sensing its master's disquiet.  It stuck its head outside the bars and chirped at the aged wizard.

            Dumbledore smiled.  He stretched out his left hand and ran his index finger along the line of the bird's skull and neck.  The phoenix closed its eyes and chirped happily at the headmaster's caress.  "There, there," said Dumbledore.  "We're not going to let Voldemort—or anybody else—harm a feather on you."

            Holmes sat watching this.  There was a small, sad smile upon his face.  Abruptly, his expression tightened, as if an unhappy thought had wormed its way into his consciousness.  He fidgeted in his chair.

            The movement was not lost upon Dumbledore.  He turned from lavishing affectionate attentions upon the phoenix to regard his friend with some concern.

            "Holmes?  Is anything wrong?"

            The Great Detective seemed to drop out of his reverie.  "No," he said.  "Just remembering old friends."  He leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table.  "Tell me, Dumbledore, do you remember that black day, back in 1945, when you went to confront the sorcerer Grindlwald—there, in the ashes of Hitler's bunker in the ruins of Berlin?  Who was with you then?  _Who was it?_"  The detective's voice had sank to a whisper.  The fire in his eyes had reignited as he spoke.  He leaned over the table, his head thrust forward and gray eyes boring like high-intensity lasers into those of the old wizard.

            "Tell me, Dumbledore," he said, a harsh edge coming to his voice.  "_Tell me!_  You _must_ _remember_!"

            The headmaster's chair slid back.  "Holmes?  What is this?  What's going on?"

            "This is the last piece of intelligence Snow gave me, before he left.  This is of vital importance, old friend.  It is _imperative_ that you recall who was present that fateful night.  Please, old friend.  The world itself may depend on your remembering."

            The wizard's brows furrowed.  "My allies?" he asked.  "Why I—"  He stopped short as the realization hit him.  "I—can't remember!  Holmes, the battle, it's—all a blur!  I cannot remember a thing!"  His face was grim as he reached down, opened a drawer within his massive desk, and withdrew his Penseive, the magical device within which a large portion of his memories were stored.

            "This is impossible, Holmes," he muttered.  "The greatest battle of my life, the final destruction of a threat to the entire planet—yet I can _not_ recall what happened."  He looked up at the detective sitting across the desk from him.  "This is far too important for me to have forgotten anything about it, far less everything.  Old friend, is this strange loss of memory, too, the doing of those individuals you have spoken of?"

            Holmes nodded.  "Yes.  But I suggest you endeavor to seek that missing memory out immediately.  It will tell you better than I can how we came to this present predicament."

            Dumbledore nodded.  "Aye, I will."  Then, he concentrated, drew his stray thoughts up around his mind like a cloak, and sent his consciousness diving, diving, deep down into the silvery depths of the mercury-like liquid that filled the Penseive's bowl.

            Visions of memories long past swirled around him as he floated, bodiless, in the strange, para-mental realm in which he found himself every time he used the device.  He saw himself, on that dreadful day, waiting outside the house at Number 4, Privet Drive with a certain black cat, waiting for the groundskeeper Hagrid to arrive on Sirius Black's flying motorcycle with the infant Harry.  He saw himself once more at the trial of Barty Crouch Jr., saw himself once more take part in the sentencing of that young man to a lifetime of imprisonment in the prison Azkaban, where soul-sucking Dementors stole every joy, every hope from every prisoner's mind as it arose.

            He floated farther back, past his memories of that happy time, when Harry's parents, Lily and James, had been students of his, along with the rest of their little coterie.  Sirius Black.  Remus Lupin.  And Peter Pettigrew.  Had Albus Dumbledore, in that strange twilight zone that was where the Penseive stored all his memories, had a body then, he would have frowned.  The sundering of that merry group of friends was yet another crime among the many already heaped upon the Dark Lord's head.

            He went even further, past the Swinging Sixties and the Booming Fifties, past the memory of his first encounter with the time-traveler who called himself the Doctor.  Dumbledore would always have fond memories of the man; of the time they'd worked together to prevent the insidious robot race known as the Daleks from exploiting the abilities of certain rogue wizards in their planned campaign of global conquest.

            As he traveled back in time, Dumbledore found more and more memories in which certain details of the scenes seemed blurred or out of place.  He found this worrying.  The Penseive was ultra-secure, ringed about by numerous wards, the secret of whose disarming only Dumbledore knew in full.  The mage did not exist, the headmaster was sure, whose power was sufficient to penetrate the wards and execute such drastic alterations upon any of the aged wizard's memories.  So, how in the world had his memories, which had been thought safe, been tampered with?  And why?

            The answer eluded him, but Albus Dumbledore was sure that before the day was out, he'd find out.  He swam even deeper, back into the '40s, and into the dark, desperate days of the Second World War.

            He found the memory he wanted almost immediately.  A thick mist hung over the entire scene, obscuring it in the same way a cataract impedes the vision of a blind man.  All that could be made out were his own form, facing off against another, hazy in the distance, arms raised as if just about to cast a great and terrible spell.  The aged wizard tried to enter the scene, to relive the memory of that day in his own body, to see once more with his own eyes the scattered rubble, the ruined temple to the old gods in whom Grindlewald had believed, and to whom he had been the chaplain of the Fuhrer himself, and the evil man himself, standing before the altar, arms raised, ready to cast that one last, desperate, defiant spell, held in readiness since the year before in the event of the defeat of the Third Reich—to cast that spell, and plunge the world entire into darkness, death and destruction, for if the Nazis could not hold that world within their grasp, they would very well make sure that no one else would.

            He found himself blocked, as if a solid wall surrounded the vision, rendering it impassible to all who came.  Stretching out his consciousness, he felt along the barrier, searching for some flaw, some weak point through which he could enter the forbidden zone.

            There wasn't.  Wherever he tried, the barrier seemed solid, flawless and diamond-hard.  There was no way in—not, at least, unless he attempted to force his way in.  The aged wizard drew back a little, the better to place himself such that the entire force of his attack was not wasted.  He shuddered to think of the damage he could do, letting off any amount of mystical energy in this other-realm.  Therefore, he aimed his attack carefully.  If he did this right, even if his attack failed, there probably wouldn't be any averse side effects.  If he failed…

            Thus, Albus Dumbledore executed his attack with a finesse greater than was his usual practice.  His mystical bolt splashed red against the misty barrier—and dissipated into thin air.  The barrier shimmered, but held.

            Again he struck, and again.  Each time, the bolt evaporated, seemingly without effect, right off the barrier's surface.  The barrier held.

            Then, as Dumbledore prepared to strike a fourth time, the barrier began first to ripple, then to flicker, in and out of existence, at increasingly haphazard intervals.  Then, in a flash of light that seemed to rival the sun itself, the wall disappeared.

            And Dumbledore could now see the memory of long ago which only moments before he had forgotten.

            He stood, arms raised, wand in hand, its tip towards the heart of the black wizard Grindlewald.  Around him, Black Horrors danced, summoned by the Nazi to slay the mongrel Englishman challenging him, giving him the chance to conclude the ritual uninterrupted, to summon up the old gods, and thus use their power to avenge the Third Reich upon the bodies of the citizens of America and the United Kingdom.  But Dumbledore stood, untouched, as the Horrors danced about him.  They squealed, they cavorted—and they died.

            For Albus Dumbledore had not come alone.  Out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a crimson and blue flash flitting about, cutting great bloody swathes out of the writhing masses of Black Horrors.  Above him, emerald energy flared, as if drawn from the very heart of a star, and another dozen Horrors died.  Beside him, a man in yellow and black crushed the skull of yet another Horror, fists striking with a force that could have, and had shattered tanks.  A tiny hourglass dangled from his throat, and a great yellow cape billowed out behind the man's broad back.

            All around the aged wizard, men and women in colorful costumes fought back the creatures of the night.  They were a strange company: scientists, explorers, historians, even royalty.  Some wielded mystic artifacts, channeling the very powers of the gods themselves.  Others fought using marvelous devices of their own creation, and still more with the miraculous abilities that nature, fate or blind chance had bestowed them.  The bravest of them fought against the creatures armed only with guns, makeshift melee weapons, or their own two fists.

            Albus Dumbledore knew them well.  They were heroes, all of them.  The year was 1945, the place, Berlin.  And those colorful heroes, those men and women who ran, fought, flew and wielded the powers of gods—they were the Justice Society.

            And then, the hidden memories of nigh on a hundred years of secret history flooded in on him like a rushing tide.

            There was a wrenching lurch—and Albus Dumbledore found himself back in his office, the Pensieve cradled between his hands, and his friend Holmes leaning across his desk, a concerned look upon his face.  Fawkes, was chattering frantically, jumping up and down within his cage.  Dumbledore shook his head, trying to clear it—the abrupt transition back into the real world had left him dizzy with its awesome speed.

            "How long did I take?" he asked.

            "You were in the trance for almost an hour.  I was beginning to worry.  How are you, old friend?"

            Dumbledore waved his hand tiredly.  "I'm all right, Holmes.  Just give me a few minutes."  He sat there, resting his forehead in his palm, till the pain had subsided a little—the dizziness had rapidly been superseded by a splitting headache.  He glanced at Fawkes, who was once more sitting upon his perch, staring at him with wide and worried eyes.

            "You miss your mistress, don't you?" he asked the bird.  "The Great Bird of Flame, the mother of all your race.  She calls to you, doesn't she, from wherever it is she's gone?"

            "So you _do _remember?"

            Dumbledore's face was grim.  "Yes.  I remember.  Back in 1986, when the skies turned red as blood."

            "And again in '97, when the Sentinels ran amuck."

            "Yes…"  Dumbledore nodded.  "Onslaught and the Anti-Monitor.  All those heroes, dying in the battles to stop them.  And now we are weaker than ever before…" He sighed and bowed his head, stroking the head of the phoenix as he did so.  "Tell me, Holmes, what is to be done now?  We are overstretched already fighting Voldemort.  What other resources can we bring to bear against this new threat?"

            Holmes was silent for a few seconds.  Then he spoke.  "Snow has gone on to Japan to inform Masaki.  Of us all, he possesses the greatest power.  The Kherubim are unreliable; they are caught up with their own war against the Daemonites.  The Men in Black are also distracted; according to our sources, they have received intelligence indicating that the Colonization is imminent.  It is expected that they and the Syndicate will join battle any time now.  Connor McLeod has sent the call out through the Watchers to such Immortals as will respond.  The Count also has promised to pass the word on to the vampires; they too will stand by us.  Other than that, we are gathering such heroes as remain."  He smiled.  "It is proposed that we form a league of extraordinary individuals to undertake our most hazardous missions."

            Dumbledore chuckled.  "Would that proposer happen to be the Countess?"

            Holmes was grinning now, a feral, predatory expression.  "She prefers, as always, to be referred to by her _maiden_ name.  Marriage has not altered her fiery nature one whit."

            "I would hardly expect it to; after all, she hasn't changed in all the time _I've_ known her!"  The two men laughed.

            "Seriously though," Holmes said after they had quieted, "The boy.  His abilities are considerable.  If our war against the Four is to be commenced any time soon, it will be necessary to eliminate their agents, both intentional or otherwise.  Will you old friend, consent to a joining of strengths?  In return for allowing us to recruit the Boy Who Lived?"

            Dumbledore stroked his beard.  "He might not wish to join you, old friend," he pointed out.

            The corner of Holmes' mouth twisted up.  "I know," he said.  "All I ask is permission to approach him with our offer.  Any decision to join us will be his, and his alone.  Honestly, old friend," he chided the mage, "you ought to know me better than that!"

            Dumbledore laughed.  "Of course, of course!  Forgive me my joke.  Very well then, when do you plan to present young Harry with your proposal."

            Holmes smiled.  "I was hoping for tomorrow, as soon as he arrives.  In fact, I was hoping to allow him a visit to the Diogenes Club, before presenting our case."

            "That you have, old friend, that you have."  Dumbledore chuckled.  "You know, he thinks you're a character in a storybook."

            Holmes grinned.  "I wouldn't want it otherwise.  I wouldn't be under cover if everyone knew I existed, would I?"

            "No, of course not.  Tomorrow then?" asked Dumbledore.

            "Tomorrow."

            And they shook on it.

**_Back to Home_**


	2. Strange Days

            Holidays.  Harry had never looked forward to them; when they ended, he would usually be jumping for joy—at least, he would have if his aunt and uncle weren't constantly watching him like vultures.  They weren't particularly pleasant individuals; whenever he stayed with them, he'd been half-starved, forced to do all the unpleasant tasks around the house, and then confined to his room whenever he was not wanted.  It had been a small consolation for him to discover, in his fifth year, that far from being the social lions that his aunt had always held them to be, the Dursley family was in fact held in polite contempt by a good number of their so-called friends.  It _was_ a little mean-spirited, true, to feel pleased about it, but Harry had been under their thumb for almost fifteen years at the time, and thus it was unavoidable that he should harbour _some_ animosity towards them.

            This year, though, Harry found himself regarding the end of the holidays with not a little wistfulness.  Not a little of this feeling was engendered by the fact that this, the summer of 1997, was the first summer in his life when he'd actually been happy.  This year, instead of returning to the house at Number 4, Privet Drive, he had accompanied his friend, Ron Weasley, back to his family home, the Burrow, a large, rambling structure in which dwelled the diverse and multitudinous members of the burgeoning Weasley clan.  Two of Ron's brothers had gotten married, and with their wives had taken up residence in unoccupied sections of the Weasley house.  Harry had found himself surrounded with warm, friendly faces.  It was deeply moving, he thought, as he strolled along the grand concourse of King's Cross Railway Station, to know that so many people cared.

            His road had not been an easy one.  He had borne the marks of destiny since he had been a babe in arms.  The Dark Lord Voldemort, for reasons unknown, had come upon his parents' house in the dark and destroyed it, and them.  The battle had been spectacular; the resulting lightshow had been visible for miles around.  When the great pyre of eldritch energies had finally subsided, the muggle authorities had descended upon the area in force, dispatching police and other emergency personnel to the scene.  They had found the empty, burnt-out shell of a small stone cottage—and the charred bodies of Lily and James Potter.  Harry was nowhere to be found.  He had been taken, unscathed, from the scene of battle by the half-giant Rubeus Hagrid, transported upon the flying motorbike of his godfather, the animagus Sirius Black to Privet Drive, where he was placed upon the doorstep of his mother's sister's house, with a note from Albus Dumbledore explaining the situation tucked into his swaddling-cloth.

            The whole thing had turned out to be a colossal mistake on the arch-wizard's part; Harry had been regarded by the Dursleys as an onerous burden and a freak of nature, rather than as actual blood-kin.   Yet try as they might to suppress Harry's unusual heritage, to condemn him to the life of a drudge instead of the glorious destiny that lay before him, Harry's mage-blood, and the mark of a lightning-bolt upon his brow, left there by that last failed death-spell cast by Lord Voldemort, had marked him as a person of Fate, around whom great things and monumental events would revolve.

            That heritage had come to full fruition upon his eleventh birthday, when out of nowhere mysterious letters had begun to arrive.  Soon, Harry found himself caught up in a world of wizards and witches, of spells and flying broomsticks, and eventually ended up embroiled once more in the machinations of the Dark Lord Voldemort, and had been instrumental more than once in thwarting the evil mage's plans.

            This year, though, the coming of the school term had been marked by dire tidings.  The last week's attack on Diagon Alley, reported with varying levels of detail and alarm by both the magical and mundane presses, had signaled one thing to those in the know: that the secret war that had been fought for seven long years in the shadows, the war about which in their most secret of councils ordinary wizards and witches had whispered about but hardly dared to believe in; the war had broken out, out into the open.  From now on, it would be waged against all comers, whether magical or mundane, and it would not stop, not until the world entire lay within Voldemort's grasp, and all within had bent the knee towards him.

            Harry shuddered.  He had _seen_ the Dark Lord's mind, during their last encounter, just a few months before as they stood, locked in a duel of sorcerous energies.  The sight had, for a few precious moments, paralysed him with despair.  The sheer monstrosity contained within that human skull was beyond belief.  Harry had seen visions of a world in ruins, cities destroyed, razed entirely to the ground merely for the crime of having been the work of Muggle hands, and last and worst of all, a long line of Muggles, being herded by laughing Death-Eaters into some sort of enclosure, where they were "processed", reduced from human beings to mere meat-animals, stripped, hunted for sport, bred like cattle and suffered unspeakable horrors and hands of Death-Eaters.  It was not just the sight itself that had horrified Harry—not just that, but the air of vicious satisfaction—of shrieking, gibbering glee almost—that had hung like the smoke of Hell itself over that horrendous vision inside that hideous mind.  The Dark Lord had nursed his hatreds long and well, and his vengeances no less so.

            They had almost destroyed him then, as he stood, facing them atop the roof of the Lloyd's Building.  Only the intervention of the stranger known only as "Alucard"; a man whose acquaintance Harry had struck up as he tailed the Death-Eaters through the sewers to their meeting place, had saved him there and then.  Even so, the Dark wizards had escaped, leaving behind them the still bodies of the muggle security guarding the building.  As Alucard had explained it as they too fled the scene, the building was situated atop a massive vortex of extradimensional energy, the like of which was only rivaled by the fabled Hellmouth.  The Death-Eaters had planned to use this energy, channeled through the great metal-reinforced pillar at the building's heart, to summon up some…_thing_.  Harry had only had the briefest of glimpses of whatever it had been, but what he had seen, even more than the contents of Voldemort's mind, had been sufficient, when he thought about it later to induce in him an uncontrollable shivering fit.

            There were rumors, Harry knew, that the wizarding race had not arisen naturally, that it had been created, for their own unfathomable purposes, by vast and unutterably alien beings from beyond the stars.  More, several of the legends involved humans, both wizard and Muggle, coming into contact with these strange intelligences.  Most ominously, no one of these unfortunate adventurers had ever been recorded as surviving their encounters intact.  Inevitably, though they lived through that first, horrifying brush against a reality far vaster and more unforgiving than anything in human experience, they all went mad.  It might take months, or even years, but slowly, inexorably, they each and everyone descended into screaming, raving insanity.

            Harry could feel it himself, deep in the darkest corners of his mind: a small voice, gibbering away, screaming at his consciousness about the utter meaninglessness of life—about the insignificance and impotence of the human race in a vast and uncaring cosmos.  He did his best to ignore it.  Thus far, he had been successful; the voice had remained, up till now, just a nagging whisper in his waking moments.  There were times, though in the night.  He would wake up screaming now and then, his mind reeling from the sight of some half-remembered horror, a Thing whose shape he could not describe, yet the memory of which filled him with dread.

            He shuddered.  There was a pillar next to him.  He put his hand on it, feeling the comforting roughness of the solid brick under his palm, and leaned on it.  _This_ was real, he told himself.  The pillar was real, and the train station was real, and Hogwarts was real, and all those he knew were real.  Professor Dumbledore, Sirius, Professor Lupin, Hermione, Ron, and everybody else.  Even Draco and Professor Snape, enemies though they were of his.  They were real, and good and evil were real.  _That_ was the truth.  He would not succumb, try as it might, to the hideous wiles of that otherworldly force.  He _would not._

            He felt a slim hand upon his arm.  He turned.  It was Ginny.  Virginia Weasley, flower of the Weasley clan, the only daughter among the many sons of Arthur Weasley.

            "Harry," she said.  "You don't look too well.  Is everything all right?"

            "Huh?  Oh, yeah.  No, Ginny, it's all right.  I'm fine.  Really."  He smiled at her reassuringly, the smile seeming to him to echo hollowly through the caverns of his consciousness.  _He_ certainly didn't feel reassured.

            She examined him for a few moments, staring deeply into his eyes, as if searching for something, some sign of duplicity, perhaps, as if somehow, she _knew_ what had happened to him that dreadful night.

            _You fool,_ he thought.  _If there is anything worth fighting for in this world, it's her.  _She_ matters.  Don't you get it?  Those Great Old Ones can do whatever they like.  I'll stand against them again if I have to, because of her.  _They_ can't stop me._  

            Tenderly, he took her hand.  "Really, Ginny, I _am_ all right.  I was just thinking, that's all."

            "About the attacks?" she asked.

            Harry looked at her.  She seemed…subdued somehow. _Scared_, almost.  Since his fourth year, almost the entire wizarding world had known about the resurgence of Voldemort.  To most, however, he remained a distant, though menacing figure.  When, after the disastrous events of the Tri-Wizard Tournament, no further threats had emerged for some time, the demands of normal life had shoved any worries about the Dark Lord into the background.  Ordinary men and women still had livings to make.  There were still children to be educated.  The complacency that, in every society, inevitably occurs every time a grave threat fails to emerge had set in.

            Only a select few, those who had been involved personally in the struggle against the Dark Lord, had remembered, and held themselves ready, waiting for the day when he would strike again.  Over the past two years, they had fought a shadow war, carrying out the actions against the Death Eaters that the Aurors themselves could not undertake.  In a hundred secret holdings of the Death Eater cult, in the darkness of night, in hidden alleyways and mystical locations known to only a select few powerful wizards, the secret spell-war had been waged.  Harry himself had been a participant in the war, thwarting, with the assistance of his friends, the plots of the Dark Lord within Hogwarts itself for two years running.

            Still, though, the covert nature of the cult's operations indicated that, in all likelihood, its dark master had not the strength at his command to conduct a campaign in the open even against the magical authorities of Great Britain alone.  This sudden change of tactic had been interpreted as a dire sign by several who were knowledgeable in such things.  Surely the Dark Lord had to realize that such an attack, in the middle of an area heavily populated with wizards, and for no apparent reason, would bring the full wrath of the wizarding government down upon his organization.  A powerful wizard Voldemort was, but even he could not single-handedly conquer the world.  Hence, to expose his cult so to such a response, out of the blue, could only mean one thing—that, against all expectations, he had built the Death Eaters to such strength as he believed could take all comers, wizard or Muggle.  And he had done so without betraying at all his organization's true strength.

            There were those among the secret warriors who favored a second explanation: that Voldemort had found allies.  Though there were many in whom whose hearts the Dark Lord's creed of hatred towards the non-magical folk had struck a chord, yet in comparison to the wizarding population at large, they were pitiably small.  Outside of Europe, the proportion was even smaller.  Though the Dark Lord might gather them all under his sway, yet should they in the slightest attract the attention of the mundane governments of the world, they would not survive.

            Thus, the wizards and witches whose task it was to oppose the Dark Lord found the news of the attack ominous indeed.  Even more ominous, though were the reports of what had accompanied the Death Eaters in their latest assault.

            Several of the survivors had reported seeing strange            creatures, a weird cross of fish, man and frog, alongside the attacking Death Eaters at Diagon Alley, wielding a type of magic that no wizard had ever seen before.  The slobbering, chanting horrors had set upon the civilians present with death-spell, tooth and claw.  Conventional curses had bounced off them, recoiling on their casters as if they had turned their wands upon themselves.  Even those few with the wit or the daring to essay the Unforgivable Curses upon these creatures had found, to their horror, their castings turned back upon them.

            Try as both the Ministry of Magic as well as the cabal to which Harry belonged did to suppress it, the news of these strange new allies of Voldemort had leaked out into the wizarding population at large.  Though it was, as yet, only regarded as a rumor, it had contributed to the general air of tension that for the past week had hung over the wizarding world.

            All this passed through Harry's mind as he considered the young woman whom, he was quite sure, he loved.  She was not aware of the hidden struggle that had gone on behind the scenes of everyday life.  Harry found himself uncertain as to what, if anything, he should tell her.  Should he reveal the existence of that inner society of which he himself was a member, as a means of allaying her fears?  After all her father and several of her brothers were themselves members of that society.  What harm could it do?

            No sooner had he asked that question in his mind than he found the answer:  None at all.  Yet the war against Voldemort was a _secret_ initiative.  Had he been working alone, he might have safely revealed all he knew.  But there were others, and to tell any outsider, even one so trusted as Ginny Weasley, could affect the fates of dozens of other wizards who played their own parts in the struggle against the Dark Lord.

            "Yes," he said.  He turned, still holding her hand, and walked with her along the platform, towards the station café.  Passing a clock, he glanced up.  It was early still; the train to Hogwarts would not leave the station for another hour yet.  Perhaps, he thought, there would be time to have a drink with Ginny…

            Hopefully, it would also give him an opportunity to take his mind off his troubles for a few minutes.

            "He's so much stronger, isn't he?" asked Ginny, somberly.  "It seems like he's got so much power now, and for so long, we just forgot he was there."

            Harry shook his head.  "It happens, Ginny.  People don't like to think too much on these sorts of things—they're not made that way, actually.  Only when danger's staring them straight in the face do they get a move on."  He sighed.  "You can't really blame them, actually; that's just the way people are.  Only sometimes it can become so bloody counterproductive."  He shook his head again, his expression grim.

            "We'll fight, won't we?"  Ginny's voice was soft.  Harry felt her hand close just a bit tighter around his.

            He smiled.  "Of course we will," he said.  "I don't see how we can do otherwise.  I just doubt that we'll win, though."  His smile faded as he pondered that grim prospect.  Then, abruptly, he chuckled.  "Of course, one good thing about this whole affair is that the PM's probably lit a fire under Minister Fudge for letting this happen."

            Ginny chuckled too as they entered the café.  It was crowded; there seemed to be many more people waiting to use the trains on this day of this year than there had been in the past.  Harry's practiced eye identified almost half of the people within, sitting quietly at tables, sipping tea or lemonade, as wizardly folk.  There were a great many young children, accompanied by anxious parents as they counted out the minutes until the great train from London up to the loch in Scotland over which Hogwarts stood was ready to leave.

            Barely days after the attack, Headmaster Dumbledore had issued a statement opening Hogwarts to children under the age of twelve.  The school was, both physically and metaphysically, the most well protected location in the British Isles.  A great many parents had taken him up on the offer.  A war was looming, and the children, who could not as yet lift their hands to take part in this struggle, nor comprehend the motivations behind the belligerents, had to be protected.  Dumbledore's offer of the school as a sanctuary had been well-received indeed.  Now, every magical child in the United Kingdom was on his or her way north, to Hogwarts, and to safety.

            Harry looked around.  He could hear the people talking, both wizard and muggle, filling the café with their voices.  A chance word, overheard here, another there—there was an undercurrent of tension within the conversation, and he could feel it.

            He led Ginny by the hand to an empty booth, tucked away in the corner.  A waiter came over to take their order.  They made small talk as they waited, discussing the possibilities of the coming school year, remembering old and mutual friends.

            Ron Weasley entered the café, followed closely by Hermione Granger.  Harry waved.

            Ron spotted them almost immediately.  His face lit up as he took Hermione by the hand and they threaded their way through the tables to where Harry and Ginny sat.  

            "Hallo, Harry," he said, as he sat down.  "I think you've been having designs on my sister.  Good thing we caught up with you just now."

            "Ooh, you'll suffer for that," replied Ginny.  "Poke him in the ribs for me, will you, Hermione?"

            "With pleasure," said Hermione, and did just that.

            Ron winced.  "Ow," he said.  He looked around.

            "A lot more crowded around here than usual," he observed.  "If Voldemort were to decide to attack…"  He let the thought trail off.

            Harry sighed.  He supposed there was no escaping talk of the war.

            Ron was right.  If the Death Eaters were to attack now, with so many wizards gathered in one place; if they could achieve the element of surprise, they might very well wipe out almost all viable opposition to their plans in the British Isles.

            As if to confirm his gloomy hypothesis, there was a thunderous detonation outside.  The great glass roof of the train station burst inward, showering the hapless pedestrians below with thousands of razor-sharp shards.

            Panicked shouts filled the café.  Harry, Ron and Hermione shot to their feet, wands out and ready.  A few other wizards and witches were already fighting their way to the door, their wands crackling with mystical energy in anticipation of a fight.

            As they pushed their way to the door, Harry noticed Ginny, her wand out and ready, following him a few meters behind.  He turned.

            "Ginny," he called.  "What are you doing?"  
  


            "I ought to ask you the same thing," she replied.  "Why are you three heading _towards_ the fight?"

            "Ginny—" he began, then broke off.  "Look, it'd take too much time to explain.  Just get to a safe place.  We'll take care of this."

            There was a sudden surge of people back from the entrance to the café, as a green bolt of light splashed against the doorframe, narrowly missing the wizard who was crouched at its foot, firing off spell after spell with his wand.  The rush knocked Harry off his feet, straight into Ginny's arms.

            She pushed him off.  "Don't say that to me, Harry Potter.  You want a piece of the fight, and so does my brother.  What is _wrong_ with you?"

            Before Harry could answer, he heard Ron's voice, calling from beside the doorway.  "Harry!  Hey, Harry!  Where are you?"  He turned, and saw a hand waving frantically above the heads of the crowd.  "Help!  We can't hold all these people back ourselves!"

            Harry turned and began fighting his way through the small crowd thronging the café door.  A hand grabbed at his sleeve and attempted to pull him off his feet; a quick fire-spell, and the owner of the hand abruptly withdrew it, clutching his singed appendage as he did so.

            At the door to the café, several wizards and witches were attempting to restrain a crowd of panicked Muggles, and not a few wizardly folk, from leaving.  

            Ron stood, arms raised, wand waving in sinuous patterns, trying to hold the crowd back with a shield-charm.  Beads of sweat sprang forth upon his face, and the veins stood out upon his forehead as the strain of maintaining the shield told upon him.  Harry and Ginny found themselves pressed up against the shield by the anxious mob.  Pressed between the two, Harry fought hard to breathe.

            Abruptly, the doors to the kitchen flew open.  Hermione's voice, magically augmented, rose over the din of the crowd.

            "The kitchen!  Everyone, there is an exit through the kitchen.  THE KITCHEN, EVERYBODY!"

            Already an exodus had begun.  Those timid souls who had, upon the first report, taken cover in corners and under overturned tables, had already begun scrambling out through the kitchen door, through the kitchen itself, and thence to freedom out the back door.

            The crowd melted away around Harry, as gradually, its members realized that a new avenue of escape had been opened to them.  With a sigh of relief, Ron dispelled the shield—and was immediately tackled by a desperate mother.

            "My baby!" she cried, frantically.  "My baby's out there!  Please, sir, let me out, PLEASE!"  She struggled as Harry, Hermione and Ginny attempted to pull her back, away from the vicious firefight raging outside.

            "Excuse me," said a voice.  A strong hand came to rest on Harry's shoulder.  He turned.

            A tall man stood there, clad in trench coat over a well-cut suit.  He looked expensive, well-groomed, his blond hair coiffed in the latest fashion.

            "Is anything wrong?  You seem to be having a problem."

            Harry stared.  There was a pitched battle going on outside, and this man, a _Muggle_ by all the look of him, was standing there calmly, asking questions.  As if to emphasize the incongruity of the moment, there was a thunderous crash outside.  In his arms, the bereaved mother began her struggle anew, calling out weakly for her baby.

            "Sir--" Harry began, but the blond man held up his hand.

            "That's all right lad, I know what's going on out there.  There, ma'am," he continued, addressing the distraught woman.  "It's all right now.  Your child's safe, no fear.  I'll get him."

            "But," Hermione spoke up, "Sir, whoever you are you'll be killed out there."

            The man shrugged and smiled.  "Probably," he acknowledged, "but most likely not.  I'm more formidable than I appear, Ms…?"

            Hermione ignored the implied question of her name.  "Sir," she repeated, raising her wand, "I can't let you go out there.  It's—"

            Anything else Hermione might have said was lost as a hideous creature leapt through the door, bowling over the wizards who crouched there firing spells into the hideous melee taking place without.

            It was something out of a decadent's worst opium-nightmare, an atavistic, slobbering combination of man, fish and frog.  A smell as of rotting seaweed rose from its flabby body.  Its mouth worked as it moved, contorting its already hideous visage into yet more repulsive forms.  From deep within its bulbous throat, a series of horrible, slobbering sounds issued, monstrous in their every syllable.  They spoke of ancient days, of dark things lurking in swamps since before the advent of men, waiting, waiting…

            It was perhaps understandable, therefore, that at that very moment, everyone lost their heads.  Hermione's wand whipped round to point at the horrid beast, her mouth open to speak a curse in the thing's direction.  Ron cried out, and shook himself free of the mother's grasp to point his own wand at the slavering monstrosity.  The struggling mother broke free with a shriek from the grasps of Harry and Ginny and retreated into the far corner of the room.

            Ron and Hermione both fired at the same instant, twin bolts of the _Stupefy_ charm racing forth from the tips of their wands.  The hexes both splashed into the creature's slimy hide—and then, rebounded forth, back along their original paths to strike their horrified casters before they could even shout.

            Harry was just getting his wand around to point at the creature when the blond man gripped his shoulder with an almost superhuman strength and tossed him aside to land on the floor.  A grunt from the other side of the man told him that Ginny had been treated the same way.  The monster howled.

            And then, Harry heard the blond man cry out, in a voice that rebounded of the stone walls of the café:

            "KIMOTA!"

            And there was a thunderous detonation, a flash of light so bright that Harry, his head turned in the opposite direction, was almost blinded.

            And then, silence.

            Slowly, carefully, Harry raised his head.

            The creature lay there, its neck broken, its head almost severed by the immense force used.

            "Wha—what happened?" asked Hermione as she got up.

            Ron was staring at the corpse.  "Unbelievable."  He looked around.  "Where'd that guy get to?"

            Cautiously, Harry poked his head out the door.

            The station was a shambles.  Great splatters of blood and other bodily fluids marked the walls—including the one that led to Platform 9¾, where the Hogwarts Express waited.  Bodies lay everywhere: Muggle policemen, civilians, a few wizards.  Scattered about were the black-clad forms of the attacking Death-Eaters.  They had not died pleasantly—most of their corpses looked as if they'd been struck by an artillery shell at point-blank range.  One of the great trains had been lifted bodily off the tracks.  As Harry looked, he saw a hand and a foot sticking out from underneath one of the carriages.  A broken wand lay just a few inches beyond the hand's fingers.  Harry shuddered.

            There was a commotion at the end of the concourse.  Harry looked up.

            His breath caught in his throat.

            "Oh, _shit!_"  It was not often he swore; he could count only three occasions within the last two years when he had done so.  On _this_ occasion, though, he was so overcome with shock, so utterly dumbfounded by a sight which, prior to this he had believed impossible, that the obscenity seemed the most natural thing to say.

            Hermione came up behind him.  "This has got to be a joke!" he heard her say.

            Ron looked from one of them to the other.  "Harry?  Hermione?  Give me a clue guys, I've got no idea what's going on here.  Who're those people over there, with the captured Death-Eater?"

            Six people stood, bathed in the sunlight streaming down from the broken roof, at the end of the concourse, holding a struggling Death-Eater in their midst.  Five people out of legend, out of tales so outlandish, so strange that for years they had been dismissed as mere children's stories, consigned to exist only in the world of four-color inks and cheap newsprint.

            The blond man, standing tall above the rest, his muscular form clad in a skintight costume of sky blue, two letters 'M', one above the other, emblazoned upon his chest: Miracleman, the science hero, the product of British ingenuity and scientific genius.

            Beside him, the broad-chested man with the British flag displayed proudly upon his chest, and upon his head a mask with the same flag down to just above his mouth, his every move speaking of power controlled, and majesty: Captain Britain, the Pendragon, heir to the mantle of King Arthur, his mighty form empowered by the magicks of the great wizard Merlin himself.

            In the center, holding the Death-Eater captive with what looked like a very vicious arm lock, another man, clad also in the colors of the flag, though slighter and more slender than the last two: Union Jack, Britain's champion of the common man since 1942, the man who fought the forces of evil armed only with his wits, his automatic, and his own two fists.

Standing by his side, her silvery hair blowing in the wind, clad in leotard of gold that reflected the sun's rays, turning her into a living sun herself: Spitfire, the speedstress of World War II, able to outrun airplanes and catch speeding bullets before they ever found their targets.

            On the other side of the couple stood a grim-faced man, clad head to toe in black armor.  Upon his shield, a great star blazed forth, brilliant against the background so black that no light ever reflected off it, while his sword glowed, even in the day, with an uncanny light: The Black Knight, last scion of a line of proud heroes, stretching back to the days of the Round Table.

            Last of all, there was a girl, blonde hair tumbling to her waist, carrying a jeweled scepter and clad in white, all white, looking for all the world like a fairy-tale princess come to life: Sailor V, pretty champion of light and justice the world over.

            Harry clapped his hand to his forehead; he felt as if he'd fallen into one of Dudley's comic books.  "This can't be happening.  I _must_ be hallucinating.  I _must_ be hallucinating."  He turned to Ginny.  "Ginny, tell me I'm not seeing this," he pleaded.

            "Um, Harry, no," she replied.  "I can see them too."

            Harry groaned.  He took off his glasses and pinched his nose.  "Days like these, I wonder if anything's real anymore."  He sighed.

            Ron looked at him as if he'd gone mad.  "Will someone clue me in as to what's going on here?  Who are these people, and why are you and Hermione so upset about seeing them here?"

            "They're superheroes, Ron," said Hermione.

            "What're superheroes?"

            Hermione sighed, and closed her eyes for a few moments.

            "Superheroes, Ron," she said, in a tired voice after she opened her eyes, "are fictional characters.  They're from a genre of Muggle literature where people with marvelous powers dress up in funny costumes and go out to fight crime."

            "Kind of like Aurors, then," said Ron.

            Harry leaned back against the solid stone wall of the train station and laughed, hysterically.  "Yeah, something like that.  Except that they're fictional.  Only thing is," and he jerked his head at the six figures standing over the struggling Death Eater, "That lot are characters from one of the most popular Muggle comic books now on the newsstands.  Do you see what's wrong with this picture now?"

            "Yet some stories, young Harry, may have a basis in truth.  And that of Excalibur, the Defenders of the British Isles, is among them," said a voice behind them.

            From out of the shadows emerged Albus Dumbledore.  Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny started.

            "Professor Dumbledore!"

            The old wizard nodded fondly at the four of them.  They were, when all was said and done, his favorite pupils, his protégés in the secret war against the Dark Lord.

            "Hello, Harry," he said.  "Ron, Ginny, Hermione."  He nodded at each of them as he spoke their names.

            "Professor, what's going on here?" asked Harry.  "Who _are_ those people?"

            Dumbledore smiled.  "Them?" he asked, nodding in the direction of the superheroes.  "They, Harry, are exactly who they appear to be.  No more, no less.  Us wizards and witches are not the only things hiding in the shadows of this strange world."

            Miracleman walked past, bearing in his arms a sleeping child.  He went into the café.

            "He _did_ save her baby," breathed Hermione.  There were tears in her eyes.

            Dumbledore smiled again.  "Yes," he agreed.  Then he sobered.  "There is a proposition for you, young Harry, and also for your friends, if they so desire."

            "What is it, Professor?" asked Harry.  The war had demanded a great many things of him since it had begun; he had a feeling that this would be another.  _No matter,_ he thought.  _Whatever it takes, I'll do it.  I'll see Voldemort defeated if I have to die to do so._  "What is it?"

            "Well, Harry, first, I must remind you: as I said, some stories do have a basis in truth.  Do you understand this?"

            Harry nodded.  What was all this about?

            "Good."  And Albus Dumbledore turned, and gestured to a figure standing behind him, and a tall, thin, man, aquiline of face, with a high, intelligent brow and piercing grey eyes stepped forward and extended his hand.

            "Hello, Mr. Potter.  I'm Sherlock Holmes, and I've come to help you in your war against Lord Voldemort."


	3. Heroes of the World

            "I can't _believe_ it," said Hermione, for the fifth time since they'd arrived.  "It's—it's _Sherlock Holmes_, everybody, _Sherlock Holmes!_"

            Harry did not answer; he was too busy staring, goggle-eyed, around at the contents of the shelf-filled room in which they were.  Strange artifacts, weapons, portraits of strange looking people adorned the walls where they were not covered with capacious bookshelves, filled to the utmost extent with mysterious, and sometimes ancient-looking tomes.  He turned to face the nearest wall.

            There was a portrait hanging there, a fine oil depicting a handsome, fair-haired young man, carrying a cane and dressed in the fashion of a dandy of the mid-Nineteenth century.  Harry stared up at the smooth, fair face.  He seemed to be smiling, the man in the portrait, his laughing eyes seeming to peer out of the canvas at the ephemeral creatures who stood and gazed up at him, while he, ever unchanging, hung there, hung, while the original who'd posed for the portrait had long since passed away, hung there, and would hang yet, while the young man who stood before him, the young man with the wild, dark hair and large green eyes who admired the skill with which the portrait, all those years ago, had been painted; hung still, while that young man too would have long since gone to his eternal reward.

            Harry felt a chill.  While, on first, glance, the man in the portrait seemed like someone he could have been friends with, had they met, the longer he stared at it, the more he found himself unable to shake the feeling that there was some unnamable evil, something which, though long since gone, had left a subtle psychic echo for all who could feel it to do so, hanging about the canvas, and more particularly, about the figure of the young man thus immortalized upon it.

            Harry's eyes fell to the brass plate mounted along the bottom of the frame.

            _Dorian Grey_, he read.

            Harry shuddered.  The name awakened within him a dim recollection.  He'd heard it before—and yet…

            Try as he might, he could not place within his memory the recollection of that fell artifact.

            "Look, Hermione, I understand you're overwhelmed and all that," Ron was saying.  "Whoever this Holmes fellow is, he's got you very impressed.  Just snap out of it, will you?  It's not like you at all."

            Hermione turned on him.  "Don't you know _anything_ Ron?  Sherlock Holmes _isn't supposed to exist!_  He's not real!"

            Ron shrugged.  "He looked pretty real to me."

            Hermione looked as if she was about to say something sharp.  Then, abruptly, she deflated.  She sat down in the nearest chair and put her head in her hands.

            "I know," she said in a small voice.  "I know.  It's just that—nothing seems _real_ anymore, does it?  It's as if we're all living in a storybook together with Mr. Holmes and all those superheroes and who knows what else?"  She shook her head.  "I don't know what to think anymore, really, I just don't know."

            Ginny went over and put her arms around Hermione's shoulders.  Her eyes sent a mute appeal in the direction of the two boys.  They looked at each other, neither one knowing exactly what, if anything, he was supposed to do or say.

            Finally, Harry stepped forward.  "It's…all right, Hermione," he said, awkwardly.  "I mean, we've been through worse than this, haven't we?  Basilisk attacks, the Tri-Wizard tournament, that incident with John Constantine back in fifth year—it's all been a lot of wild stuff.  I mean, you have to admit, this isn't that much more weird than anything else, is it?"

            Ron nodded.  "Yeah, that's right.  What he said."

            Hermione smiled a wan smile.  "I…I suppose so."  She sighed.  "I guess you're right.  We do seem to lead rather exciting lives don't we?"

            Harry smiled.  "Oh, we do indeed."  He turned and looked round the room they were in.  It was part of a secret annex, a hidden complex of rooms and corridors buried deep beneath the British Museum.  "A haven for all those aspects of British Intelligence too strange and opposed to common reality for anyone beyond those in the highest corridors of reality to place the slightest credence in their existence," Holmes had called it.  It certainly looked like it.  He found his gaze drawn to several other pictures mounted upon the wall.

            As Ron, to cheer Hermione up and take her overtaxed brain off the almost surreal events that had preceded their arrival in this place, called her and his sister over to examine a strange contraption of fluorescent tubes laid out in a vaguely familiar mystical pattern, Harry stepped up to the wall again, examining closely the set of portraits that had so caught his eye.

            The first was an oil painting, a broad canvas lavishly daubed with brilliant colours.  Four men, clad in the style of the Jacobean period, stood atop a richly patterned carpet, one that to Harry's eye looked vaguely familiar.  He looked down.  His shoes sank deeply into the lush pile of a carpet that was, if not the same carpet, very similar.  He looked up again.

            There was a brass plaque set into the picture frame beneath each man's feet.  A name was inscribed into each, presumably identifying the man beneath whose feet the plaque rested.  Moving closer, Harry read the names off.

            Standing at the extreme left of the painting was a tall, dark-haired man, attired in Puritan costume.  A long, slim blade was slung at his left hip.  "Solomon Kane," the legend beneath him read.  Beside him, nearly as tall, was another man, dressed in travel-stained robes, with a faraway look in his eyes and a traveler's knapsack at his feet and a wide-brimmed hat in his hands.  The plaque below this strange individual identified him as "Christian, the Pilgrim".

            Standing in the very center of the canvas was a bearded, white-haired man.  Harry's breath hissed in through his teeth.  He recognized this man.  Prospero, the Duke of Milan, one of the more famous wizards of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, famous for liberating en-masse the trapped sprites of an island in the Mediterranean, imprisoned within the trunks of trees by the dark witch Sycorax.  Few outside the wizarding world knew that the duke had, indeed been a real person, the account of his imprisonment and subsequent release being told first-hand to Shakespeare at the latter's house in Stratford.  The story was one of the more popular children's anecdotes told to young wizards by their parents.  Yet, here, in a place that, in Harry's opinion, would be the last one where magic of any kind could be found, was a picture of this man.

            Harry thought a while, then shrugged.  True, he was in the middle of Muggle London, yet this was a place where legends out of childhood stories walked.  If Sherlock Holmes truly existed, why not other such extraordinary individuals?  And why should not such individuals, though they had not the slightest bit of magic, by virtue of their strange and adventurous lives have knowledge of the hidden world in which Harry now spent most of his time?

            Harry turned toward the last man in the painting.  Like Prospero, he too was old, though unlike the robed wizard, he was clad in a heavy suit of armor.  The old warrior had obviously seen many campaigns in his time; his skin was bronzed through long exposure to a burning sun.  The hilt of a massive broadsword stuck up over his right shoulder.  Below his feet, the plaque identified him simply as: "Don Quixote de La Mancha".

            Quickly, Harry moved to examine the other paintings.  He _knew_ Don Quixote.  Though he had not read the book, he _had_ heard from others of Miguel de Cervantes' comic tale of a brain-addled noble obsessed with resurrecting the days of chivalry and romance in his own body.  Yet, judging from this picture, it seemed that the old man had not been so mad after all.  To Harry, this group of paintings and photographs hung upon the oak-paneled wall had the feel of team portraits—of the various assemblies of strange and unusual people who, throughout the ages, had made this site a haven for those of their kind who chose to serve the crown.  What then, would he find if he looked just a bit further?  Which characters, whose adventures he had thrilled to, back when he'd been attending the local primary school with his cousin Dudley and stayed in the classroom during lunchtime in order to avoid his bullying relative, reading the storybooks kept there to keep himself occupied, would he find brought to life here, in this place?

            Half a minute later, he stopped, bouncing on the balls of his feet in his excitement.  There, standing within a canvas dating from the last years of the eighteenth century, surrounded by a herd of miniature livestock, was an ancient man, seemingly over a hundred years in age, identified by the plaque set into the frame below him as "Lemuel Gulliver".  And, standing on the opposite side of the painting from him, leaning upon his trademark weapon, was Nathaniel Bumppo, the Long Rifle, whose adventures had been set down upon the written page by the pen of James Fenimoore Cooper.

            Standing beside Gulliver was a stunningly beautiful woman, her shapely shoulders rising like those of a goddess from the lacy waves from a dress that left very little to the imagination.  "Fanny Hill," read her plaque.  Harry quickly transferred his gaze away from her—the woman's state of…near undress and the coy attitude that she'd assumed in the picture were giving him urges that he'd rather not have at the moment.

            A couple stood in the center of the frame.  They were, from their dress, obviously wealthy, and, from the way they clung to each other, obviously deeply in love.  Their plaque identified them as "Sir Percy and Lady Marguerite Blakeney".

            The last figure was a tall man, swathed in a heavy cloak, a wide-brimmed hat casting a deep shadow over a masked face from which two glittering eyes peered out like malevolent flames burning in an awful silent night.  Rather incongruously, the plaque below him read "The Reverend Doctor Syn".

            Well, well.  Lemuel Gulliver and Nathaniel Bumpo.  And if he remembered correctly, the man identified as Sir Percy Blakeney was, in fact, the legendary Scarlet Pimpernel.  Harry stood back and cast his wondering gaze at the rest of the portraits adorning the walls.  There they hung, the memorials of heroes, of men and women who fought the good fight, who, when their times came, passed not into obscurity, but into the legends of the people whom they'd worked so hard to save.  It was, he supposed, a strange kind of immortality.  He wondered if some day, some boy out there in the world would close a book and dream about living through those very adventures alongside the Boy Who Lived.  It sounded a good way to be remembered.  He grinned.

            "Bloody hell!"  Harry turned, his pleasant reverie rudely interrupted by his friend's awed curse.  "Harry!  Come quick!  You _have_ to see this!"

            Harry went over to where his friend was bent over the strange apparatus of fluorescent tubes that so uncannily resembled a magical circle of protection.  "What is it, Ron?" he asked as he neared the little group surrounding the device.

            "It _is_ a protection circle!  Look at it!  It's powered by electricity!"  Ron's voice was a whisper.

            Hermione was kneeling beside the now-active device, probing it with her wand.  As Harry watched, a bolt of silver shot forth from its tip, only to dissipate without trace as it crossed the glowing blue tubes on the outermost extremity of the electrified circle.

            "It makes use of the magnetic forces generated inside the tubes as well as the blue light to keep things out," she said.  "It's amazing.  Whoever built this—he was absolutely brilliant.  He must have known such _things_ about both magic and science."  Her voice turned wistful.  "I wish I could meet him."

            "His name was Thomas Carnacki," said a voice.  "And he was a good friend and a comrade of mine."

            The four young people gathered around the device turned.  Standing in one of the doorways was a tall man, dressed in archaic evening attire, a dark cape sewn with the badge of some unknown chivalric order draped about his shoulders.  His face was pale and thin, almost wolf-like.  As he smiled they noticed his teeth.  To each of them, it seemed as if his upper canines were strangely long, almost touching his lower gums.  Yet, as Hermione, Ron and Ginny blinked their eyes, it seemed to them almost like an optical illusion.  One by one, the three of them dismissed this strange deformity from their minds.

            Harry, on the other hand, remained unmoved.  He _knew_ this man, had fought beside him on that fateful night when all unawares, he had looked upon that which not even a wizard such as himself was meant to know.

            "Mr. Alucard," he greeted the new arrival.

            "Young Harry," replied the other, swirling the edge of his cape about him as he bowed.  "You look well."  He spoke with a slight accent; Hermione frowned as several of the inflexions struck a note within her memory, then shook her head as she failed to place it.

            "Harry?"  Ginny looked up into his face.  "You know this man?"

            Harry's lips tightened.  He did not want to recall anything about _that_ incident, not now.

            Behind him, Ron spoke.  "Uh, Harry, I don't think we've met this guy before.  You wouldn't care to introduce us would you?"

            Harry looked at him.  Beneath his serene exterior his mind churned.  He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself.  "Ginny," he said.  "Ron, Hermione, this is Alucard.  Mr. Alucard, these are my friends."

            The tall man smiled, revealing his strange teeth once more.  "A pleasure to meet you finally.  Harry has told me many good things about you."  He bowed, then shook Ron's hand.

            "Ah, the lovely Virginia," he said, taking Ginny's hand in his own.  "I see now how you won and keep the heart of a hero such as our young Mr. Potter.  Did my heart not already belong to another, it, too, would be yours."

            Ginny blushed.  "Oh," she said.  "Thank you.  Uh, how did you and Harry meet?  I'm sure he would have told us about it."

            "It was the 13th of July, this year.  I was engaged in tracing the activities of your so-called 'Death-Eaters'.  What he was doing there, I do not know.  Perhaps—"

            He turned.  Harry had not heard him, however.  He was reliving the events of that horrific night.  He saw himself standing on the roof of the Lloyd's building, wand raised, tip to tip with the Dark Lord Voldemort's, saw the triumphant leer on his opponent's face as the magic within their wands' twin cores lashed out, staggering the Death Eaters surrounding the pair—staggering them, and seizing the minds of the two through the bond of blood and death that the both of them shared, laying each open to the gaze of the other.  And still he heard Voldemort laugh.  And then he was seeing the horrid images again, and, now, he realized that as he had stared into Voldemort's mind, so had the Dark Lord stared into his.

            And then he remembered the bats swooping down out of the night, Alucard in their midst, scooping him up and carrying him out of the circle of startled Death Eaters.  Voldemort had laughed then.  He had swept up his wand to point towards the skies, and his Death Eaters in the circle had done the same.

            Alucard was already on his feet, sprinting towards the summoning circle.  Shaking off his shock, Harry staggered after him.

            Alucard reached the circle of Death Eaters.  A mighty swing of one hand, and the nearest of the dark wizards sagged, disemboweled from behind.  Voldemort's voice had risen to a shriek, just as Harry stumbled into the ring, and, too groggy to muster a coherent spell, had resorted to grabbing the Dark Lord's arm and attempting to force him off balance.

            And then, just as he seemed to have succeeded, and the Dark Lord tottered and fell in a tangle of black robes, the skies opened…and Harry screamed.

            He saw…things, amorphous, drooling shapes of impossible geometries formed out of the reeking ichors of a million, million swamps.  He saw tentacles reaching out to him, reaching _past_ him, reaching to take the world in their grasp and turn it into a horror-wracked parody of what it had been before.  He heard…_voices_.

            At first, he had taken them to be mindless babblings, the sounds created by the squatting slime-things that inhabited this realm outside reality.  Now, as he lived through that instant one more time, he realized that they were words—words that no human tongue could have pronounced, it is true, but words nonetheless.  They called to him, filling his mind with their evil sibilance.

            "_Ia!_' They cried.  "_Ia, Yog-Sotthoth!  Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!_"

            Again and again the horrendous refrain repeated, with each iteration driving Harry's consciousness further and further back as they advanced, tentacles outstretched, to take possession of his living mind.  As he screamed, he could here, as if from a distance, the voices of Ginny and Alucard calling his name…

            "Harry!"  Ginny cried.  "_Harry!_"  The girl was hovering on the edge of panic.  Was this some new, insidious attack of Voldemort's?  Was the Dark Lord so powerful now that he could strike down, at will, the only wizard to have successfully opposed him?  These thoughts and more flashed through the frightened girl's mind as she sobbed and attempted to revive the man she loved.

            Alucard shouldered her aside.  A look of concentration came over his face as he bent over Harry's still body.  Then, a few moments later, he turned to Ginny.

            "Girl," he said, "link minds with me."

            Ginny stared at him.  "Link minds with me," he repeated.  "Quickly, girl.  Your lover's mind lies on the brink of madness as we speak.  He loves you.  If any one can pull him back from the precipice, it is you."

            "How—how am I supposed to help?" she stammered.

            He placed his hand upon her shoulder.  "Relax," he said.  "Look into my eyes; you will feel my mind coming into contact with yours.  Good," he breathed as their minds touched one another.  "Now, brace yourself.  We will enter young Potter's mind.  Be ready.  When we have entered, call out to him with all your heart and all your will.  Now, we go."

            And with that, Ginny felt a rushing sensation, a brief illusion of her flying down, down into Harry's face, and found herself, standing with Alucard, in the middle of a long, high-ceilinged chamber.

            Alucard spoke.  "This place," he said, "is a representation, a construct created by your mind, of the structure of young Harry's psyche.  He should be within here somewhere.  Go, call out.  Wherever he is, he will hear you.  And, perhaps, if he is able, he will respond."

            Ginny called, trying her best not to dwell too heavily on the words _if he is able_.  The thought of her beloved Harry lying trapped, held prisoner in his own mind by forces beyond comprehension was almost too much to bear.  Again and again she called, letting her heart and all her soul and all her might go out into her cries.

            They listened.  Then, floating down the corridor, almost too soft to be heard, came the sound of Harry's voice.

            "Ginny?  Help!"

            Ginny spun in the direction from which the voice had come, almost falling in her haste to reach her beleaguered lover.  Alucard was already ahead of her, his long legs  almost impossibly fast pace.  Ginny's lungs began to burn with the effort of trying to keep up with the strange man.  She found herself falling further and further behind…

            Just as Ginny was beginning to think that, try as she might, she would lose sight of Alucard, and be forced to wander these halls for eternity, her soul trapped within that of her fallen lover's, they found Harry,.  As they approached the place, they saw in the distance the corridor they were in ending abruptly, the walls, floor and ceiling all just ceasing to exist, the passage opening into what seemed to Ginny like a yawning abyss.  Just beyond, seemingly suspended in empty space, was Harry.

            Alucard came to a stop and stood looking across the gulf at his young ally.  Almost effortlessly, he stretched out an arm and arrested a breathless Ginny in her headlong charge just moments before, unable to check her momentum, she would have run over the edge and plunged into oblivion.

            "This is worse than I thought," he muttered as he steadied the tired girl.  He tilted his head, listening to the horrid, chanting voices that somehow echoed about the vast emptiness beyond the end of the corridor.  Beside him, Ginny recovered herself sufficiently to be able to steal a glance at the scene before her.

            She screamed.  Alucard winced as his super-sensitive ears amplified the sound, nearly deafening him.

            "Wh-what _are_ they?" Ginny managed to gasp out.

            Harry was surrounded in the midst of the blackness by a veritable horde of shambling, amorphous shapes.  Tentacles wrapped around his arms and legs, seeming to be pulling him down, down into the infinite darkness.

            Alucard cursed.  "Yog-Sothoth!"  His lips parted as he said this, revealing his long, razor-sharp canines once more.  This time Ginny saw them as clear as day.  There was no mistake.  Alucard was a vampire.  Shaking with fear, she took a step back, retreating both from the edge of the pit as well as from the man she now knew to be one of the most dangerous supernatural creatures in existence

            Swifter than she thought possible, the strange man seized her hand, holding it tightly in a vice-like grip.  "Do not seek to run, girl.  You cannot escape me, nor will you help your lover escape the things that have him in their grip.  This hole represents the madness that is overtaking his mind.  Do you wish him to fall here, to fall irrevocably into the madness of those unfortunates whose misfortune it is to look full in the faces of the Elder Gods?"

            Speechless, Ginny shook her head.  Alucard's fingers felt as if they were crushing the bones inside her wrist.  Try as she might, she could not _keep_ a gasp of pain from her lips.

            Alucard's eyes flickered to where his hand was wrapped tight about her wrist.  Ginny felt his grip loosen slightly.

            "Virginia.  I pray that you listen to me.  I can do no more for you here.  Whether or not we can retrieve young Harry from his present predicament—that is up to you."

            Ginny took a deep breath.  She was afraid.  Deathly afraid.  The terrible surreality of the past few hours began to creep in on her.  _Don't panic…don't panic._  Her breaths came increasingly harder and faster.  With a tremendous effort of will, she managed to stop herself before she started hyperventilating.  Tears sprang out from beneath her closed lids.

            _Now I know how Harry feels, _she thought.  She'd always wondered what it was like to be the Hero of the Wizarding World—how, every year, without fail, Harry could go out to face the denouement of whatever hellish plan that Voldemort had thought up, go out and face it, and through skill and determination and sometimes just blind luck, end the horror he faced before yet more death and destruction could be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world.

            Now, she faced a similar test.  And, for her, the price for failure would be Harry's life.  One life.  Seemingly, a tiny thing compared to the stakes already being fought for in the secret places of the world.  But when that one thing was the life of one of the very individuals whose lot it was to stand between the wolves and the flock; when that one thing was, indeed, the life of the man she loved—she didn't know if she could bear the strain.

            Yet—yet, for Harry's sake, she would try.

            Suppressing a shudder, she looked full into the vampire's face.  "What am I supposed to do?"

            "He fights madness, girl.  He fights the psychic echo of the horror he saw that night, when he and I defeated the Death Eaters atop the tower of Lloyd's.  The more he struggles against it, the more it will consume him.  He has not the strength to resist."  Alucard pointed a long-nailed finger at her.  "Your love for him.  It is your strength, yours and his.  Reach out your hand towards him.  Let him know you are with him.  Only that will grant him the strength he needs to break free."

            Ginny nodded.  She stepped to the edge of the truncated floor, her right arm stretched out in front of her.  To her surprise, though Harry seemed to be more than a dozen yards away, she found herself able to place a slim hand upon his shoulder.  Suddenly, Harry was no more than an arms length in front of her.

            Confined as he was by the grasping tentacles, Harry managed to twist himself half around to meet this new threat.

            He caught sight Ginny standing not more than three feet behind him.  His face changed.  The look of despair upon it disappeared, replaced by a mixture of hope and grim determination.  First one, then the other of his arms pulled free of the grasping pseudopods.  Moving quickly, Ginny grabbed hold of him.  With a wrenching lurch, Harry's legs came free.  Freed abruptly from the grip of the horrible, amorphous things, they staggered back together along the corridor, away from the reach of those foul tentacles.

            Alucard knelt by their side.  "Harry!" he whispered urgently into the young wizard's ear.  "Quickly, boy!  Seal this chamber of your mind against these servants of darkness!  The power is yours!  Use it!  You have only to think the deed, and it will be done."

            Harry looked up at him groggily.  The vampire hissed in annoyance.  "Hurry, boy—or do you wish them to consume the rest of your living soul, and us along with it?"

            Slowly, painfully, Harry got to his feet.  Leaning upon Alucard, he turned towards the gaping hole where the tentacles thrashed and writhed in search of their escaped prey.  His head was pounding, as if all the drums in the world were being beaten in time with each other, right there inside his skull.  _A wall,_ he thought.  _I need a wall._

            The effort of concentration almost proved too much for him.  Fresh waves of agony swept through his tortured brain as he concentrated all his will upon creating a barrier against the hideous tentacles.  Gradually, so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, an ethereal wall flickered into existence across the open end of the corridor and begin to solidify.  The tentacles' writhing grew even more frantic as the substance of the wall began to solidify _inside_ of them, cutting them off from whatever thing it was that controlled them.

            As the wall finally grew into rock-like solidity, the tentacles convulsed one last time—and fell, lifeless, to the floor.

            Harry sagged against Alucard.  It seemed as if he'd been trapped within that squamous, noisome pit since forever.  Even now, he felt as if his escape were only a dream, that, in fact, he was only hallucinating, and that his real self still struggled, trapped, by those horrid tentacles in the dark space of his mind.

            And then, his vision blurred, and he was back in the secret antechamber, deep below the British Museum, with Alucard, Ginny, Ron and Hermione looking anxiously down at him.

            "Harry!"  Ginny cried, and flung her arms around him.  "Oh, Harry…that was…that was…_horrible!_"  She shuddered.  "What _were_ those things?  Why were they after you?"

            "What happened, Harry?  You totally wigged out there."  Ron knelt at his friends side and helped drag him to a sitting position.  "Was it...was it You-Know-Who?"

            "Mr. Potter was having an unpleasant flashback to the events of our last encounter," said Alucard.  Seeing Ron's eyes narrow with sudden suspicion, he raised his hands, palm out, in a pacifying gesture.  "No, no, my young friend, nothing of the sort happened.  In fact, he was a willing and able ally in the fight that ensued."  Alucard's eyes rose.  "He did not tell you of this?"

            Ron turned to where Harry was being helped into a chair by Hermione and Ginny.  "No," he replied.  "All we know is that he came back that night looking like death warmed over and refused outright to tell us a bloody thing."  The corner of his mouth twisted in a frustrated, angry grimace.  "It's not as if we didn't try, dammit.  He just _refused_.  Every time Hermione or Ginny or I tried to bring the damn thing up, he just…clammed up!  _Bloody Hell!_" he swore, slamming his hand down on a nearby table top in frustration.  "We tried to give him some room, you know, let him tell us on his own time.  But he never did.  And _now_ look what's happened!"  He set his knuckles on the table and stared into the eyes of the portrait hanging on the wall above it, his jaw set in anger.  Then, remembering himself, he turned back to Alucard.

            "Mr. Alucard, what _really_ happened out there?"

            "Ron," Harry said.

            The red-headed young man turned and regarded his friend with a jaundiced eye.  "What?  Don't tell me you're going to reveal all now?  For your information, you just gave us quite a scare, there.  Not to mention how worried we all were after you got back that night.  A bit too late for that, isn't it?"

            Harry looked down.  "You don't understand, Ron.  I wasn't trying to keep it from _you_…I was trying to keep it from myself.  To forget it."  He looked directly into his friend's blue eyes.  "What I saw that night was beyond description.  You wouldn't have understood the horror of it…"  Harry rested his head in his hands; he needed a few moments in order to compose himself.

            Then, the whole story came spilling out: how he had left Hogwarts in pursuit of Draco Malfoy, flying behind the young Death Eater through labyrinthine underground caverns that honeycombed the entire country, passing above strange, subterranean cities in pursuit of his foe, until, at long last, they had both emerged out of a sewer in London; how, then, he had met Alucard, the vampire then in pursuit of the supporters of Lord Voldemort through the air.  Then he related the battle, and it took all of his self-control to allow himself to finish telling the tale.  "What I saw out there wasn't meant for human eyes, Ron.  No human mind can see that, and remain sane.  Every time I think about it, just for the slightest moment…I slip closer to madness."  Harry took off his glasses, running a hand over his face.  "We're ants, Ron.  There are things out there that are so far beyond us that we're just like ants to them—or even less."  He took a ragged, shuddering breath, and let his head fall into his hands.

            Ron stared at him, uncomprehending.  "I don't understand."

            "It was the summoning, boy," said Alucard.  "Lord Voldemort did not visit that skyscraper and slaughter every person in it to call up some minor minion."  The vampire's voice was grim.  "No," he continued, "what he intended to call was nothing less than a servant of Yog-Sothoth itself."

            Hermione gasped.  Everybody turned to look at her.

            "Yog-Sothoth?  But that…_that's madness!_  I can't believe it—I mean, not even Voldemort would be mad enough to do _that_."  She paused.  "Would he?"

            "Uh, Hermione, mind speaking English for those of us who don't know what's going on here?"

            It was Alucard who answered him.  "Yog-Sothoth is the chief of the Elder Gods, the parasentient manifestation of all levels of existence.  It is vast beyond human comprehension, so vast that to look upon it will plant the seeds of madness within any mortal mind.  It lurks beyond the border between this plane of existence and the next."  The vampire took a deep breath.  "There are some who say that as the sum of human knowledge grows greater—as your scientists delve ever deeper into the secrets of quantum physics and the very structure of reality, they will find him, and that when he awakes, no power on earth or in the skies will be able to stop him…"

            The four from Hogwarts felt a chill down their spines as he said this.  Whoever he was, the vampire was obviously afraid—afraid of this mysterious extraplanar deity whose power seemed overwhelming and whose advent seemed inevitable.

            "Yes," whispered Hermione.  "That's what he is, except…I knew about him only from what I read about his servants here on Earth.  Dagon…and Cthulu."

            "Cthulu, yes," mused the vampire.  "I would not be surprised if it was indeed him who inspired Lord Voldemort to such a mad endeavor.  I fear…I fear the Dark Lord has lost what little sanity, if any, he ever possessed."

            Ron was staring suspiciously at Alucard.  "Super-strong…flying…telepathy …control over the creatures of the night…you're a vampire aren't you?"

            The tall man turned to face him, cape swirling about his body as he did so.  "So, you know.  I was wondering when you would work it out.  Your little sister here has known for some time now.  So has young Harry."

            Ron rounded on his sister.  "Ginny!  You've known all this while we've been sitting with a vampire and you've never told us?  How could you?  What if…uh…"  He trailed of as he realized Alucard was standing right next to him.  "I mean, what if something happened?"

            "You mean what if I had, all of a sudden, decided to attack you?  I assure you, Mr. Weasley, had I wished to take you, I could have done so to all of you by now.  You would already have become creatures of the night, bound to my service.  Such is not my intention.  Not all vampires harbor love for the Dark Lord Voldemort—as your friend Harry can attest."

            "Alucard!"  Hermione suddenly straightened, as if struck by a sudden thought.  "That…that's not your real name at all, is it?" she asked, staring straight into the vampire's face.

            The vampire stared back.  Then, suddenly, he threw his head back and laughed, the rich, terrible sound echoing off the far ends of the corridor.  "Well done!" he roared.  "Very well done indeed, young Granger!  Yes, indeed, Alucard is not my true name.  Very well.  Allow me to introduce myself."

            He bowed low, sweeping his cape about him in an impressive flourish.  "I am Count Dracula, and I welcome you to this place."

            "I don't suppose you're _that_ Dracula?" asked Harry.  "You know, the guy Bram Stoker wrote about?"

            "The same," replied the vampire, his eyes shining.  The fangs were in full evidence now.  The sight, to the four friends, was rather more than a little intimidating.  This was a vampire lord of the greatest power, a legend among wizards and Muggles both, and there they were, sitting in the same room as he was, chatting as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

            "It figures," said Harry, smiling faintly.  "I mean, we've already met superheroes as well as Sherlock Holmes.  Why not you while we're at it?"

            "Why not indeed?" laughed the vampire.  "I say to you, young Potter, whatever you have seen here, and elsewhere is as nothing compared to the unseen wonders that walk this world, out of sight of the teeming masses."  His voice grew soft, and his eyes took on a distant look.  "Making it strange.  Making it beautiful…"  He trailed off.

            Harry, Hermione, Ron and Ginny fell silent, watching as this deadly, ancient, legendary being drifted off into memory, a smile upon his lips.

            After a few moments, the vampire's eyes swiveled back to look full upon them.  "My apologies," he said, smiling deprecatingly, "I grow nostalgic as time goes by.  It has been a full life, and one filled with wonder.  Occasionally the urge takes me to revisit those times in my mind."  Slowly, he advanced, until he stood not three feet from Harry and his friends.  "Soon you too, young Potter, will come to know these things.  It is our burden, and our joy."

            "W-wait a minute," said Ron.  "What do you mean 'we'?  You're not going to…"

            Dracula laughed.  "No, no, young Ron!  I intend nothing of the sort!"  He swept his arm about, taking in the entirety of the room in one graceful motion.  "This place is the meeting house of a League of Extraordinary Individuals, an alliance of the greatest heroes of the British Isles, an order of protectors whose origins go back to before the time of Christ.  Extraordinary individuals, my young friends.  Individuals like Holmes, or your Professor Dumbledore, or even those superheroes you saw defending the train station from the Death Eaters' attacks.  Individuals, my young friends, like _yourselves_."

            There was silence for a few moments.  Then, Ron spoke.  "Right," he said, his voice disbelieving.  "So, out of the blue some secret society of funny Muggles and at least one vampire ups and decides that _we're_ suddenly prime candidates to become members?  And that these Muggles have been doing things behind everybody's backs that not even the most addled, muck-raking reporter from the _Daily Prophet_ would even dare try to pass of as a real story?  Excuse me if I say that, for sheer bloody unbelievability, this story takes the cake!"

            Dracula only smiled and spread his arms, indicating, once more, the room they were in.  "The evidence, my friend, is all around you."  His voice was deathly soft.  "You have only to look, and you will find.  Go on…look around.  You can come and tell me that I lie then."

            Hermione went, slowly, hesitantly, to look at one of the photographs hanging on the walls.  From where they were, Harry and Ron saw her place her hand against the wall for support.  Concerned, Ginny made her way over to her friend to offer her help.  Hermione waved her off.

            "It's all right, Ginny.  I was just…a little surprised, that's all."  She moved on to look at the photograph on the wall next to the one she had first examined, then turned to examine a display case that contained what looked to Ron and Harry like miniscule skeletons of both humans and cattle.

            Hermione finished her examination and turned towards the boys, her face pale.  "Ron, Harry," she said, her voice faint, "He's—"  She paused a moment, lost for words.  "I think he's telling the truth."  She sighed and leaned against the wall, her eyes distant.

            "So," said, Ron, after a few moments.  "I think I ought to tell you that I still find this story bloody unconvincing."

            "I don't see why it should be," replied Harry.  "After all, if we could have tamed Hippogriffs, spoken with giants and fought off Dementors, I don't see why other kinds of weird stuff would have cropped up around the world.  And face it, Ron, not every funny occurrence happens where there's a convenient Auror handy to investigate it.  I dare suppose that there _are_ Muggles capable enough of dealing with this sort of stuff when it appears."

            Ron still looked skeptical; the look on his face clearly said, '_I'll believe it when I see it._'  It was plain he was not expecting to see anything relatively soon.

            It was Ginny who voiced the thought all of them were trying to avoid.  "But, what about that…thing in Harry's head?  Mr. Aluc—I mean, uh…"

            "Call me Dracula," said the vampire.  "It is, after all, my name."

            "Dracula, will the wall that Harry put up inside his mind be able to hold those—those _things_ out forever?  You said it would drive him mad.  He—he won't be able to hold them out will he?"

            The vampire shook his head.  "No.  I am sorry.  The tendrils of the dark god will worm their way into every corner of his mind, eventually.  The only unknown is how long he will hold out."  He exhaled.  "But he will succumb.  I imagine that for a…strong spirit such as his, it may be a long time indeed.  And far better for one such as he to strike back at the powers that laid him low, to ensure that no one—_no one_ again falls victim to the evil of the Elder Gods."

            The four looked at him in shock.  Following his revelation of the nature of Harry's curse, the vampire's words seemed extraordinarily callous.

            Harry cleared his throat.  "It's…all right, guys."  He sighed.  "Dracula's right.  With so much riding on me right now, I can't just up and leave it hanging like that because I happen to have this unpleasant visitor in my mind.  These people—these people have resources, abilities even we could never even dream of possessing.  And—and if we join them, we'll be able to face Voldemort on even terms.  It's not just our fight, now, it's the entire world's.  And if all of us, wizards and Muggles both can just hold together, maybe we can defeat him after all."  He looked down at his hands.  "But it was my fight right from the beginning, when Voldemort came to Godric's Hollow and killed my parents, and, Elder Gods in my brain or not, I'm going to see it through to the end."  He looked around at them, his face fierce and hard as granite.

            Ron, Hermione and Ginny stared back, their expressions containing equal portions grief, uncertainty and shock at the sudden change in their friend.  There was a sudden uncomfortable silence.

            Then, Ginny, unable to withstand the stresses of the day, as well as the horrendous threat looming over her lover's head, uttered a sob.

            Instantly, Harry was at her side.  He put his arms around her, letting her lean into his chest as she sobbed her grief out.

            "There," he said.  "I know, I probably don't have much time left.  Much of that will be taken up fighting this bloody war.  That can't be helped.  What matters now is that we make the most of what time we _do_ have, that we create for ourselves, even if only for just a few precious moments, a tiny bit of everything we're fighting for."  He shook his head.  "Bloody hell—I'm not saying this very well, aren't I."  He took hold of Ginny's arms and held her out at arm's length.  "Virginia Weasley," he said, looking into her eyes, "I love you.  I want to spend my entire life with you.  But I can't.  There's a war going on, and I am a soldier.  But I will give you everything I have left—all I have to give, for all the rest of my life."  He took a deep breath.  He had faced dark sorcerers, destroyed basilisks, been a witness at the hideous blood ceremony that returned his dreaded arch-enemy to life—and yet, this moment, this decision he had so abruptly made, utterly terrified him.  Deep down, he knew he was right, that this was, indeed, the best decision he could make.  "Virginia Weasley," he said, kneeling, "will you marry me?"

            Ginny threw her arms about him, weeping.

            "WHAT?"  An outraged Ron rounded on him, laying a strong hand upon his friend's shoulder and jerking him to his feet.  "What the hell do you think you're trying to do, you prat?  That—that's _my sister!_  This—this—" he spluttered, utterly at a loss for words in the face of this unexpected development.

            "Ron, I—" Harry began, but his friend cut him off in mid-sentence.

            "Don't you try to 'Ron' me you idiot," he replied.  "What the fuck were you _thinking?_  You're fighting a war, for cripes' sake, you're—you're going insane, and the both of you haven't even gotten out of Hogwarts yet!  You're seventeen, she's sixteen—and you want her to marry you?  Now?"

            Harry stared back, coolly.  "Ron," he said placatingly, "Do you honestly think that each and every one of these objections hasn't run itself through my head within the last few minutes?  I swore to do this the moment I saw her reaching out across that empty space inside my mind.  I tell you, Ron, you have no idea what it was like to be in my head then.  She came through for me, faced those things from God knows what Hell for my sake, dragged me back from the abyss—_she fought them off!_  She did it all for me, Ron!  Tell me, Ron, what did I do to deserve this?  I owe her, Ron.  I owe her _my life_.  So, tell me, what else do you think I have to give to her _besides_ my life?"

            Ron sneered.  "Right.  That's why you're leaving her to go fight a war."

            Harry's voice grew deadly quiet.  "Damn you, Ron, what the hell do you think I'm fighting _for_?"  He held Ron's gaze, as if daring the taller man to prove him wrong.

            Ron stared back.  There was an awkward silence as the two men locked gazes.  Dracula stirred, ready to intervene should the confrontation between the friends turn ugly.  He had seen many scenes like this one in his centuries-long existence: two young men, their blood hot in their bodies, heads full of hormones and easily-injured pride, coming to blows over a woman.  The vampire's lips twitched upwards.  True, Virginia was indeed Ron's sister, but it had been his experience that brothers in general could prove to be more protective—no, the word was _possessive_, rather—of their sisters even than of their brides.

            Harry's voice was a whisper.  "You'd do the same thing if it was Hermione,  wouldn't you?"  

            "Don't bring Hermione into this you—you…"  Suddenly, Ron broke away, and slammed his fist into the wall.  "_Damn you!_" he yelled.  "You think it doesn't hurt, seeing my sister like this, and you, headed on some death-trip.  Don't you think I'd want her to be happy, not pining for some dead hero?"

            "Will being insane and possessed be better for her than a dead man?  At least this way I'll be able to make sure no one—_no one_—will _ever_ have to face one of those things again!" retorted Harry.

            Dracula interposed himself between the two.   "Mr. Weasley.  I fear young Potter speaks the truth.  Consider this: would you prefer your friend's legacy to be the legacy of a hero?  Or will it be the legacy of a coward, a whipped cur slinking away into the shadows to die?  Consider, Mr. Weasley.  You, too, are a hero.  Do not make it any more difficult for your friend than it already is.  As for your sister…"  He cast a sidelong glance in Ginny's direction.  Bending close to Ron's ear, he spoke, the words quiet and swift.

            "He is a hero, your friend.  A hero.  Just as you are.  And just as is your sister.  Allow me to tell you something about heroes," he said, placing an arm around Ron's shoulder and leading him aside.  "It is a dangerous life, the hero's life.  You will never know where the next threat comes from, the next world-destroying villain against whose deranged plan you must stand.  It is an uncertain life, and even those of us who have survived, triumphed over a hundred years and more worth of foes—we are still uncertain as to whether our next day will be our last.  This is especially so, young Ron, in times such as these, when the hidden demons of a hundred years of secret history come howling out of the darkness to tear down the fortresses of light.  Oh, yes, my friend," he added, seeing Ron's confused look.  "There are greater evils abroad in the world today than the Dark Lord Voldemort."

            The vampire's face was grim—grim, and not a little sad.  "You should treasure your happiness while you may, Ron Weasley—treasure it, and at the same time do not deny your friend the same.  For we all of us need something to fight for.  And happiness is a very precious thing indeed."

            Ron looked at him, the anguish in his expression clear for all to see.  He slumped against the wall, defeat evident in every line of his long, lanky frame.

            "No," he said, finally.  A single tear trickled from the corner of his left eye and down his face.  He scrubbed at it with his left hand, then covered his eyes with that hand as he slid down the wall to sit on the carpet.

            When he looked up, he was composed again, though Harry thought he detected a slight quaver in his voice as he spoke.  "For what it's worth Harry, I'm sorry.  You do have a right to go out and face Voldemort for what he's done.  And you and Ginny do deserve what happiness you can find with each other."  He turned to face Ginny.  "Sis, I'm sorry.  Go on.  You and Harry go build what life you can.  Build the best you can.  And when the time comes for you to part, remember the fact that you had the good times.  No matter what happens, you'll always have that."

            Ginny smiled, palely, and kissed him on the forehead.  "Don't be silly.  You sound as if _you're_ the one who's about to die."

            Ron chuckled.  "Yeah, I suppose so."  He gathered his feet under him and stood up.

            The vampire count stood erect, his head tilted to one side, as if listening.  As they watched, he removed a tiny device from his ear.  "One of the several marvels our little...alliance has produced," he said.  "The others are in readiness, my friends.  Come.  Your destiny awaits."  So saying, he led them to the door through which Holmes had gone and flung it open.  Within, several men and women waited.  "Come, my friends," said the count once more, "come, and join the strange and beautiful choir of heroes immortal!"  And he gestured, imperiously, with his cape.

            And so they went.


	4. Extraordinary Gentlemen

            Harry glanced nervously around the circle of chairs that had been placed around the fireplace of the small sitting-room into which Count Dracula had ushered them.  To either side of him, Ron, Hermione and Ginny were seated in plush, horsehair armchairs much like the one he was in.  The other seats—it was the presence of the people currently occupying the other seats that was causing this sudden anxiety attack of Harry's.

            He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Ron and Hermione.  The brown-haired girl seemed to be as tense of he was, her pose rigid, her hands grasping the arms of the chair in which she was seated in a grip that, while not quite tight enough to turn her knuckles white, looked to be rather close.  Ron was looking round at the group gathered round the fire with interest.  Harry followed his gaze around the circle.  Certainly, the people with whom they were to meet were a…visually interesting lot.  In two chairs flanking the fireside sat Holmes and Professor Dumbledore.  His eyes met those of the aged wizard.  The old man bestowed upon him a nod and an encouraging smile.  Harry smiled back.  He hoped he'd be able to meet the Headmaster's expectations of him.

            Beside Holmes was a tall, stern-faced Sikh, dressed in a naval uniform of some sort.  Harry fought to keep from shrinking under the man's kestrel gaze—those glinting orbs peering out from beneath a craggy cliff of a brow, almost laser-like in their intensity.  At Dumbledore's side was another tall man, heavily muscled, with an almost feral grace to his movements, and a hint of wildness, barely controlled, in his gray eyes.

            Dracula sat away from the fire, holding the hand of a slender, auburn haired-woman.  Harry tried not to think about it, but when they'd come in and Dracula had gone to embrace the lady, he'd noticed the same pallor to her skin as there had been on the Vampire Lord's.  He shuddered.  Here he was, having tea with two of the most feared Dark Creatures around.  He wondered if the likelihood of his doing so was any greater than that of his meeting the people around him.  Probably not.

            The final member of the group was a slim, sharp-featured man with an air of indolence about him that was belied by the cold, calculating intelligence hiding within his ice-blue eyes.  Holmes had introduced him as "Raffles".  There had been a subtle antagonism between the two, as if, some time in the past, the two men had crossed swords.  At any rate, it was clear that the two of them were, at the very least uncomfortable working together.

            Holmes had lit his pipe, and was now regarding the four young magic-users with an appraising eye.

            "Now, then," he said, finally.  "I assume you all know why you're here."

            Harry straightened in his chair.  "Y—yes, Mr. Holmes, sir," he said, and immediately cursed himself for stuttering.

            The Sikh stirred in his chair.  "It is an ancient and honored society you have been chosen to join, Mr. Potter.  Its exploits in the name of the common good are many.  It counts among its members many of Britain's, and indeed, the world's greatest heroes."  He steepled his fingers.  "Seven years, Mr. Potter, you have fought your secret war against the Dark Lord Voldemort.  Now, it is time to learn the true meaning of what you do, the true scale of this war in which you fight.  There are darker and more dangerous things than the Dark Lord in this world Mr. Potter."  His eyes narrowed.  "Are you ready?"

            Harry tried not to squirm.  "I'm not sure what you mean, sir," he replied.  He was very carefully trying to avoid saying the man's name.  The shocks to his system of the past few hours seemed a bit too much for him to have to deal with…_that_ as well…

            The tall man spoke.  "You're making the boy nervous, Nemo.  It's not every day one has tea with legends such as you and I."

            "The boy is _seventeen_, Greystoke," replied Nemo.  "He has seen and done enough that legends should mean nothing to him.  After all, he is now one himself."

            "Gentlemen," said Holmes, "I believe what Mr. Potter—and Ms. Granger, here—have difficulty with is the fact that, up to a few hours ago, you and I were nothing more than characters out of a book."  His gaze swept across the faces of the four from Hogwarts.  "My young friends," he continued, "I assure you, with all my honor as a gentlemen and as a servant of the Crown, that we are as real as you are.  Think now, Mr. Potter, Ms. Granger—seven years ago, before the two of you received your letters—did either of you think, even in your wildest dreams, that there was such a thing as magic?  That before the year was out you would have flown on broomsticks, confronted a troll and rescued a precious mystical artifact from the clutches of the Dark Lord himself?  Either of you?"

            Hermione shook her head.  There was a haunted look in her eyes.  Ron glanced at her; then, slowly, he put his hand upon hers.  She clutched at it as if she were drowning.

            Holmes nodded.  "Precisely so.  And just as you found, then, that there was more to this world than the everyday realities of steel and concrete, television and radio shows and little people hurrying to and from the great cities on the highways of life, so, now, are you finding, my young friends, that there is more afoot to this game than dragons, giants, and dark-robed wizards striking in the night."

            Raffles laughed.  "My dear fellow, you do sound more like a poet than a great detective when you talk like that.  What our little secret history gained, the literary world lost when you embarked on your famed career."

            "Do I?" replied Holmes.  "Is that not because, my old rival, that is the only way one can think of to speak of such things?"  He smiled.  "It may be that I have spent entirely too much time in the company of Elijah Snow.  Tell me, though—as you stood upon the rooftops and looked north and saw the Martians in their war-walkers bearing down upon the City of London, what did you feel?"

            Raffles fell silent.  "You have me there, old chap."  He chuckled.  "It was a dashed close game, while it lasted, dodging those damned tripods waiting for Moreau's little package to do its work.  But Nemo had the jolliest time of it himself, didn't you, old chap?"

            "We nearly lost the Nautilus," replied the old Sikh, shortly.  "But let us come back to the matter at hand."  He turned back to face the young magic-users.  "Yes," he said, "this did happen.  There was, in 1898, a war fought between humanity and invaders from the planet Mars.  On humanity's side was an assortment of adventurers, scientists and crusaders, men like Holmes, Raffles, and myself."  He paused, glancing towards the lady by Dracula's side.  "And women like the Ms. Murray," He added, quickly.  "The war was won, not through the blind chance of the invaders falling victim to our own earthly maladies, but through the innovations, strategies and efforts of the most extraordinary minds this planet had yet produced."  The old man's eyebrows drew slowly together, the eyes glinting from within the deep sockets like bale-fires in the night.  "And this was only the end of the last century.  The world has grown, if anything, even stranger since then."

            Harry took a deep breath.  "I can see that, sir…"  His voice was hushed.  "And my friends and I—we're a part of it, aren't we?"  He looked round the circle, speaking the names of those present as he met their gaze.  "The Great Detective.  The Lord of Vampires—and his mate.  The Captain of the Nautilus.  The Lord of the Apes."  He stopped as he came to Raffles.  "I'm afraid I don't quite know who you are, sir."

            Raffles sighed.  "Youth these days…" he muttered.  "The Amateur Cracksman, boy.  That was what I was known as, back in my adventuring days.  A thief extraordinaire, I was.  You wouldn't believe some of the jobs I've pulled."  He nodded in Holmes' direction.  "I even had a couple of run-ins with the Great Detective himself, although, for some reason, nobody bothered to write them down…"

            "Yes, sir," said Harry, hurriedly moistening his lips.  "But we're a part of it, aren't we?  All these stories—of lost cities in the heart of Africa, of exploring the sunken ruins of Atlantis and fighting the Napoleon of Crime here, in London—they're all _real_."  His mind was racing, now, piecing together the clues he'd picked up here and there—the pictures and artifacts outside, the superheroes at the train station, the living legends with whom he had spent the last fifteen minutes chatting.  The picture that was emerging almost stunned him with its magnitude, bright and strange and full of wonder.  He realized that he was smiling, a big, silly, childlike, wonder-filled grin, and caught himself before he could embarrass himself further.

            "For a moment there, I thought you'd gone all dippy on us," commented Ron.  "Come on, Harry, what gives?"

            Holmes was looking at Ron and Ginny, his eyes thoughtful.  Finally, he spoke.  "Mr. Weasley, Ms. Weasley.  I suppose we owe you an explanation.  Tell me, does the Wizarding World have heroes of its own?   People whose _calling_ it is to venture into the outer dark and challenge the extraordinary, all just for the seeing and the doing of the deed?  Are there such people, Mr. Weasley?"

            Ron thought.  There _were_ people among the wizarding populace who went on adventures, who saw the things most others did not, who stood between society at large and the forces without that threatened to tear it apart.  There _were_ heroes.

            He had not had the opportunity in his youth to hear of the adventures of the heroes of the day—the Weasleys had been too concerned with the problems of feeding seven children in the years after the war to afford any luxuries—but there had been his father's collection of Young Wizard's Adventure magazines.  He remembered the tales—the harrowing account of the magizoologist Newt Scamander's ill-fated expedition into the Plateau of Leng; the final, apocalyptic battles of Godric Griffindor and Salazar Slytherin—old, old enemies united once more in combat against the demon from the skies that had raged across Europe and Asia before finally being brought to bay far to the east by the two sorcerers and their motley band of allies.  He thought of his brother Bill's now famous descent into the tomb of the mad mummy Imhotep, now being serialized in the pages of the Daily Prophet.  He regarded his friend, The Boy Who Lived, and thought upon the many adventures they had had together.

            Heroes, he thought.  He looked about the circle.  The names Harry had addressed each of these people by—they were the names of legends themselves.  Just like Bill.  Like Newt Scamander.  Like Godric Griffindor and Salazar Slytherin themselves.

            It couldn't be.  Or could it?  These people were _Muggles_.  They were _supposed_ to be dull, unimaginative people, each moving placidly through the motions of his or her daily life like cattle while under their noses the Wizarding World lived, bright and shiny and full of color and light and wonder.  And yet…

            And yet, these _Muggles_ claimed to have fought off an invasion from Mars.  They had lived lives at least as long as Professor Dumbledore's.  They associated with a _Vampire Lord_.  And, just hours before, he had seen people, Muggles too if they were anything, fly without the aid of wand or broomstick, call forth powers unlike any he'd seen before, and crush a Death Eater attack almost without effort.

            They scared him.  These were people who danced a deadly dance with the devils of this world without even the advantages that even the most inept of wizards possessed.  He tightened his grip on Hermione's hand.

            "Y-yes," he said, finally.  "There are heroes.  That's what you are, isn't it?  Heroes for the Muggles."

            Holmes smiled.  "Heroes.  That we are, my boy.  That we are.  Though I am sure most of us would prefer it if you refrained from using that rather ridiculous terminology to refer to those of us who are…less similarly talented than you are."  He noticed the tension in Ron's shoulders, and sighed.  "We are not monsters, boy.  Don't look so scared of us.  Did you ever think of us non-magical folk as just people who do things a little differently from you?  As people who, like, Wizarding folk, live, work, play and dream?  Who, if their experience precludes them from believing in magic the way you do, still possess a sense of wonder all their own?  Have you?"

            Ron looked down at his feet.  He had no answer.

            Into the silence, Dumbledore spoke.  "Ron."  His voice was gentle.  "You have just learned a lesson that I try to press upon every student under my care.  I do not think you should be calling him 'boy' any longer, Holmes."

            Holmes nodded.

            Shame-faced, Ron looked up at Hermione.  The disappointment in her eyes almost broke his heart.  He felt her grip on his hand loosen.  Desperately, almost despairingly, he tightened his grip.  Her hand within his felt limp, almost un-alive.  Slowly, he opened his fingers once more, gently letting her hand fall from his.

            Gently, Harry reached over and placed his own hand on his friend's shoulder.

            It was Holmes who broke the silence.  "So.  Now you know.  This is a strange world, my friends.  And there are other things beside the Dark Lord Voldemort who seek to tear it apart."

            Harry's head came up.  Other things?  He felt a chill run through him as Holmes' words sank in.  He had spent his life fighting against the Dark Lord.  He had hoped, almost against hope, that, after the battle was over, he would finally be able to rest.  Now, these tidings of new foes seemed to sound the death knell for all his dreams of peace.

            "What…other things?" he asked, finally.

              It was Greystoke who replied.  "Terrible things, Mr. Potter."  He rose from his chair, the springs creaking as they relaxed from under his bulk.  "You know what I am, don't you, Mr. Potter—where I came from?  I grew to manhood in the forests of Gabon under the care of the great apes who dwelled there.  A strange story, is it not, that one such as I should proceed from a wild man of the jungle to a Peer of the Realm?"  The gray eyes bored, gimlet-like, into Harry's own.  "It becomes even stranger, my young friend, much stranger."

            He turned and went to a bookshelf.  "In the early years of this century, there were men like me; the Great Detective," and here he nodded to Holmes, "still plied his trade on Baker Street, along with others of the same calling; and the Great Powers waged a shadow war of cloaks, daggers and deadly masterminds in the dark."  Looking over the bookshelf, he found the volume he was looking for and pulled it out.  "During the Great War, the heroes were aviators, stalking each other across the wide-open skies like predators across the veldt.  Twenty years after the beginning of the century, there were heroic scientists and dark avengers blazing trails through the urban jungles of the world, seeking out secrets in the night."

            Greystoke opened the book, flipping the pages until he found the one he wanted.  He handed the open volume to Harry.  "And, in 1933, a new creature entered the jungle.  And the world was never the same again."

            Harry looked at the book and gasped.  Greystoke had handed it to him opened to a page containing a photographic plate.  The picture was in black-and-white—it had obviously been taken in the earlier years of the twentieth century.  It was remarkably clear, though—Harry could make out the tiniest of details in the background, if he squinted.

            A man hung, suspended in mid-leap, above the rooftops of a great and sprawling city, so far above that he seemed almost to be flying.  There was joy on his face, as he looked down on the city far below, a joy that seemed to be born of life itself and the realization that this, of all things had been granted to him.

            "Good God."  Harry stared.  By now, after all he'd seen, he knew he shouldn't have been all that surprised.  He leaned back in his chair, staring into the shadows pooling upon the ceiling amid the beams above the fireplace.  Then, he sat up and leafed through the book, stopping as he came to more photographs showing men and women in strange costumes performing feats impossible with seeming ease.

            He saw the tall man in a cape as black as night brooding over the Gothic towers of a dark, fog-bound city; the statuesque woman clad in a star-spangled costume of red, blue and gold.  He saw, too, the man of flame soaring over Manhattan's skyline, locked in combat with another man with rippling muscles and tiny wings sprouting from his feet.  And he wondered.

            "They're all there," he muttered.  "It's all real.  My God.  They're all real."  He turned to Greystoke.  "Is that it, then?  All these stories—the movies, books, television shows—they're all real?"

            "Just so, Mr. Potter, just so."  He looked about the circle.  "Although I will admit that several of our biographers were responsible for some…exaggerations in their accounts of our various adventures."  There were some chuckles round the ring around the fireplace.

            "Let us not forget, Greystoke, outright misrepresentation!"  called Dracula.

            Greystoke smiled.  "Yes, outright misrepresentation, too.  Not all our biographers placed us in the role of hero.  Still…" 

He turned back to Harry.  "Do you see now, Mr. Potter, this secret world that the likes of you and I inhabit?"

Harry nodded.  "I think so," he said, then frowned as another thought came to him.  "But why--?"

"Why is it you haven't heard of them before now—if they were real?"

Harry nodded.  A silence fell around the group.  Greystoke spread his hands.

"Well.  Therein lies a tale."  He sat back down in his chair.

"Harry," said Hermione softly, indicating the book in his hands "could you pass that please?"  She seemed back to her old self, now—still a little pale, perhaps, her hair perhaps a little more in disarray than usual—but calm, composed.

He handed the book over, noting the title on the cover as he did so.  _The Planetary Guide, 1930-1939_.  The name seemed familiar, somehow.  He'd seen an edition of this book somewhere, he was sure of it.  Perhaps on one of his many visits to Dumbledore's office…

Nemo was speaking, now.  "You wish to know what happened, Mr. Potter?  There are far worse things than your Dark Lord loose in the world.  By asking this, you will have committed yourself irrevocably to our cause.  These are dangerous people we speak about, Mr. Potter.  _Do_ you wish to carry on?"

Harry looked around at his friends.  Ginny smiled and reached out to take his hand.  Ron was rubbing his face.  He looked tired.  He realized that Harry was looking at him, flushed, and looked down at his hands before glancing towards Hermione.

The Muggleborn girl was flipping through the pages of the book, her face grim.  Looking up, she caught both Harry and Ron waiting for her and nodded, her lips set in a thin, firm line.

Harry took a deep breath.  There was no helping it, he supposed.  Had he been any other person, his life perhaps happier and less trouble-filled than the one he knew, perhaps then he might have refused this challenge, refused that dreadful knowledge that, once acquired, would set him fate against fate against the dark, secret dangers that lurked within the shadows.  As it was…

He was the Boy Who Did Not Die, the Dark Lord's Mirror Image.  He _would_ know, _would_ discover the dark and hidden things.  Holmes was right.  He _was_ a hero.

Time to do his duty.

"Yes," he heard himself say, and he knew that, whatever it was that would come, his life would never be the same.

Nemo nodded.  "Very well."  He stood, the firelight catching his tall form and casting eerie shadows across the floors and walls of the sitting room.

"The War—the Second World War—was the first sign that something was going wrong.  Supermen soared into battle above the struggling hordes.  Mad scientists in hidden laboratories slaved away at monstrous devices and creatures in the name of victory."  The Sikh took a sidelong glance at Albus Dumbledore.  "Mages on both sides fought a war of dark magicks against dark magicks."

He ignored the gasps that issued from the mouths of the young wizards and witches gathered there, and carried on.

"It was only after the war that we truly discovered what horrors our new arts had wrought."  The old mariner raised a pointing finger towards the ceiling.  "Look up, young wizards.  Look up."

Harry's heart leapt into his mouth.  Hanging over the party like the looming specter of the apocalypse was a giant serpent, its jaws spread wide in a death grimace so great that it seemed almost about to swallow the tiny group that sat beneath it.

Almost without thinking, Harry's hand shot out, groping for something, _anything_—a weapon, that he would at least be able to face the monster on somewhat more equal terms.  Then he remembered that he was no longer in the Chamber of Secrets, and that the creature above him was dead, suspended from the vaulted ceiling by cables of steel.

"The remains of the serpent Manda, unleashed against London in the last of the great monster wars of the 1950s and '60s.  It was humanity who awoke them—we, with our nuclear engines of destruction and our chemicals capable of twisting life itself to new and foul forms.  The horrors we awoke—great mutated creatures, nature gone wild, even the walking dead."  The Sikh mariner shook his head.  "And yet, I count it a miracle that we did not lose faith.  Science had awakened much good into the world, just as it had much evil.  There was still hope.

"That was the era when man first took those few faltering steps beyond the atmospheric veil that shrouds this small planet.  There had been a few, before then—mad scientists, wild-eyed with knowledge that would not become generally known for decades, if not centuries to come.  But this—this was an endeavour for all humanity.  It would have ushered in a new age, where to stride through the red sands of Mars would have been as commonplace an occurrence as today a flight between the continents of Europe and America is."

The shadows seemed to gather beneath the old Sikh's brows, leaving two great glittering pools of light staring out from within the darkness.  "The project was called Artemis.  And, in 1963, they were ready to send men and women to walk upon the moon."

Hermione spoke up.  "Sir, but—the American space program _wasn't_ called Artemis.  It was—"

"Apollo?  So it was.  Yet even you must know by now, Ms. Granger, that there are wheels within wheels in this strange world within which we exist.  Do not the names themselves provide a clue as to the nature of these endeavours upon which humanity was engaged?  Apollo was an endeavour for the light, the bright face with which the public at large would see.  Artemis worked in the dark, as ethereal and quicksilver as the moon goddess from whom its name was taken, carrying out the secret mandates of America's masters away from public eyes.

"In 1963, two missions were launched.  Neither one arrived at its destination.  It is said that, halfway between the Earth and the Moon, space itself opened.  And, one after the other, the crews of both ships found themselves exposed to…something.  No one knows what it was.  What is known is that when they returned, not one of them remained, in the strictest sense of the word…_human._"

Harry found himself unable to repress a shudder.  The ancient Sikh's eyebrows rose.

"Frightened, Mr. Potter?  I daresay you should be.  Any sane man—even one of us," and he swept his hand about the circle of chairs, "would tremble at the thought of facing those beings—especially the Four with whom we are concerned at the present moment.  There were four people in each ship, you know.  Four on the first ship, whom we now face in battle, who have had a hand in half a hundred secret atrocities throughout the world these last forty years."  He sighed.  "As for the other four…they were heroes.  That, I suppose, is all that needs be said about them."

            He turned his great head towards the four young wizards observing them with old, old eyes; for all that they still held a glint of the great fires that burned within the man's soul.  "You realize, my young friends, you have committed yourselves.  By hearing this…"  He sighed once again.  "It is too dangerous a secret to place in the hands of one not of our number."

            "But what about Voldemort?" asked Ron.  "I mean—sir—we've already got one war of our own.  We can't just—"

            Holmes cut him off.  "Voldemort _is_ our first priority, Mr. Weasley.  We are as yet unable to confront the Four head to head.  They are too well hidden—too powerful, though we hope to change that soon.  The plots within plots, however, the deep secrets through which they make their influence felt upon the world—those are another matter altogether."

            "But," Hermione protested, "Mr. Holmes, you're not saying that Voldemort is a…a tool?  A pawn of this Four?  It seems…"  She shuddered.

            "Evil on the scale of Voldemort's, Ms. Granger," replied Greystoke, "can never be said to serve anything but its own ends.  Voldemort is…useful to them.  And they, in their turn, are useful to him, though he does not know who exactly 'they' are."

            There was silence for a while.  Finally, Harry spoke.  "So," he breathed.  "What now?"

            Holmes rose.  "Now?"  He glanced towards Dumbledore.  "I fear your schooling will have to be cut short—at least, at that fine institute where the four of you have spent the past few years of your lives.  It is under siege, now—the Dark Lord's forces will not willingly forgo the pleasure of destroying the one bastion of the maging craft yet available to the forces of the light in this country."  His face clouded.  "Besides, we may yet require your services in the field, my young friends.  Even so."

            He shook his head.  "And so it has come to this—that we must recruit children to fight with us.  Dark times indeed."  With those words, the Great Detective's shoulders squared—his lean frame seemed to stand a few inches taller.  "In any case," he said, a glint in his eye, "the game's afoot, my friends, the game's afoot.  And though we may yet lose all in a single throw of the die, let it, at least, be know that we have all, every one of us, played our best, this day and always."  He smiled.  "There is a…place by the seaside, where we house most of our…less conventional associates.  With Professor Dumbledore's permission, I have arranged lodgings for the four of you there.  You'll be meeting most of your new colleagues some time after you arrive there.  I trust that there is no problem with these arrangements?"

            Harry stood, too.  "I don't suppose so, sir."  He glanced round at his companions.

            "I'll go with you, Harry," said Ron, stoutly.

            Hermione stood as well, a determined look on her face.  "Some one has to keep the two of you out of trouble.  I'm in."

            Finally, a small hand slipped into Harry's own, and he turned to see Ginny smiling up at him.  "I'll go, Harry.  Anywhere.  I'll always be with you."  He laughed, and slipped one arm about her shoulders and hugged her to him.

            Holmes smiled.  "In that case, Mr. Potter—and all of you—welcome to the League!"


	5. Villagers

Harry glanced out the window of the descending helicopter. Below them was a grassy, sun-lit field, bound on three sides by quaint, flower-bedecked cottages. On the fourth side, the sea washed a white, sandy beach, stretching far as the eye could see. On and over the streets of the village, brightly dressed men and women—as well as several things that could never have passed for human—walked, floated, or even flew. It seemed a cacophony of colour, a carnival of the strange—and yet…

"It's so much like our own wizarding villages and towns," he said, half to himself. "So much hidden, so much strangeness, all away from the eyes of the world."

Hermione was sitting next to him. She leaned over, trying to catch a glimpse out of the window Harry was sitting by. Then, she shrugged.

"I suppose," she replied. "But still, Harry, we in the wizarding world have kept ourselves hidden from the Muggles far longer than they have. Just to put some things into perspective."

Harry smiled. "That's true," he said. "Then again, there's also what _else_they're hiding from here, isn't there?"

Hermione looked at him for a moment, then sighed. "I suppose," she said once more. "There is that too." She slumped back in her seat. "It's just…there's so _much_ to learn!" She smiled ruefully. "You know, Harry, I thought I knew so much. I mean, I spent all that time in the libraries, both in and outside of Hogwarts. I learned so much! And now…I guess I know now how little I really know."

The helicopter touched down, light as a feather, upon the grassy sward. From the row of seats directly in front of Harry and Hermione rose the tall, imposing form of Count Dracula, clad in long coat and gloves even in the summer sun, a broad-brimmed hat pushed down over his head to ward off the unfriendly light. As always, the feral light burning within the vampire's eyes caused Harry almost instinctively to shy away in horror. He clamped down hard upon that reflex as he followed the Count out of the helicopter and over to the edge of the field.

There was a man waiting for them there, an old man, with a face seamed by the vicissitudes of life, clad in a dark suit and standing, hands clasped behind his back, watching as the small party made its way across the grass towards him.

As Dracula neared, the man nodded at him in greeting. "Alucard."

Under the shade of his broad-brimmed hat, the vampire smiled. "No. No longer. I use my own name now. _That_ name can go to the one to whom it truly belongs."

Ron leaned over to speak into Harry's ear. "Y'know what's scary, Harry? This guy's a vampire, and here we are looking at him standing there _in the sun_ as if it was the darkest of nights."

"The discipline of Fortitude, Mr. Weasley," said Dracula, "is widely practiced as an application of the power granted us as kindred of the night. Similarly, Mr. Weasley, it is unwise to speak too openly of a vampire in his presence. _Some of us have sharp ears indeed._"

Ron gulped. "Yessir."

"Come," said the vampire. "Allow me to introduce you to the man who manages this place in the interests of our little conspiracy—John Drake."

The man inclined his head. "You must be Holmes' new recruits. Welcome to the Village."

Harry shook his hand. "A pleasure to meet you, sir." The others came up behind him, adding their greetings to his.

Drake bestowed upon them a cordial nod. "Likewise, my young ladies and gentlemen, likewise." He gestured up the path on which he was standing. "We operate a training center here, for…unusual operatives such as yourselves. Come. We've prepared quarters for the four of you this way."

The last passenger on the helicopter had wandered up to the little group. Ginny had spent the half-hour flight chatting animatedly with her, exchanging stories of the various adventures the two of them had had.

"_Ohayo gozaimas, _Drake_-san!_" The strangely blonde Japanese girl bowed deeply in greeting to the old man.

Drake paused. "Ah—" he hesitated a moment "—Minako-chan. What brings you here?"

"I came to visit Baron-_sama_. I heard he moved out here after I went back to Japan." She sighed. "I think he might be glad to see me. He seemed so sad when I had to go—so alone."

The old man smiled. "He's fine, Minako-chan. Not so alone as you'd think, too. He's living in one of the cottages on the main road up the hill. Number 6, in fact."

Aino Minako laughed gaily. "Number 6? Isn't that _your_ old house, Drake-_san_?"

"Yes, yes, it is," admitted the old man. "To be honest, I believe he finds something amusing about it. Why don't you go on ahead and surprise him?" He indicated Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny with one arm. "I'll be getting our new friends here settled in."

"_Hai_, Drake-_san_." The blonde girl waved in Ginny's direction. "_Sayonara_, Ginny-_chan!_ Maybe we'll meet again sometime!"

Ginny waved back.

As Minako turned to walk up a winding side street that led up the hill overlooking the sea, Drake led the four young wizards down the path paralleling the beach to a small, well-kept cottage within a stone-walled garden. Behind them, the vampire count clambered back into the helicopter, and as they passed through the open gate, the machine lifted off, and with a thunderous clatter, flew off in the direction of London.

* * *

Holmes puffed thoughtfully at his pipe.

"You say these raids have all taken place at libraries containing texts predating the Great Flood?" he asked.

Raffles paused to take a sip of his brandy. "It is strange, is it not, to be talking of such things in this day and age, when science claims to have conquered superstition?"

"Perhaps. Yet there is more in heaven and on earth, as the great Bard would say. Which texts did you say had been stolen?"

"The first to be taken, apparently, was a grimoire, late of the archives of the Helsing Institute. The document was being shipped to the headquarters of the Council of Watchers when the convoy came under attack. A gang of hooded and masked figures brought the vehicles to a stop, slew the drivers and guards and made of with the book, leaving the others burning in their wake."

Holmes' expression clouded over his pipe. The Council of Watchers. He, and several other members of the League, and most especially Count Dracula himself, had long-standing scores to settle with that organization. Yet he said nothing.

"Old von Bek reports that a gang of sneak thieves made off with certain Melnibonéan texts he had in his keeping while he was away." There was a hint of malice in the former Amateur Cracksman's eye. "It appears that our band of book-thieves feel less ready to contend with him and that great black sword of his than they do hapless truck drivers and security guards."

"A good thing," agreed Holmes. "Are there any others?"

"As a matter of fact, yes. Certain scrolls, as yet untranslated by modern researchers, purloined from the libraries at Miskatonic University."

Holmes sat bolt upright. "_What_?" he cried. His pipe dropped from nerveless fingers to the floor, spilling its contents upon the thick carpet.

"I'm afraid so, old man," said Raffles. He shuddered. "Terrible place, terrible place. Small wonder everybody working there goes mad sooner or later."

"Hardly," said Holmes, hurriedly beating out the smoldering embers his momentary carelessness had spilled. "The madness endemic to that unfortunate institution flows from darker sources than the area's ambience—as well you should know." He got up and began to pace, refilling his pipe as he did so.

"This is bad, Raffles," he said. "You know the class of entities those researchers at Miskatonic customarily deal with." He stopped. His gaze seemed to narrow to a hairs-breadth, as if trying to pierce the wall itself. "There are things in their libraries, Raffles, that in the wrong hands, could consume the world entire. That episode last year—that one stopped so ably by the Count and our young Mr. Potter—that episode would only have been a foretaste of what they could do."

He turned to regard the Amateur Cracksman. "We need to gain the initiative on this. We have too many enemies, Raffles. Voldemort, the Four, that madman Khan down in India—and more, besides. We may as well start here. We'll need to know exactly _what_ was stolen. We should be able to have our agents at the scenes of the crimes within the next few days. If there is any pattern to the texts that were stolen, it is possible—just possible—that we may be able to anticipate his next move."

"Perhaps," replied Raffles. "And who do you intend to use? The Council is certainly likely to be…refractory." He held his glass up to the light, admiring the color of the liquid within. "I could acquire their catalogue…"

Holmes smiled. "Actually, I do believe the Count has plans for that august body. In the meantime…" He dropped back into his chair. His gray eyes glinted. "What do you say to our sending our newest recruits to interview von Bek about these texts of his?"

Raffles spread his hands. "It sounds good enough. And I do suppose it would be good to get our young agents some experience in our line of work."

Holmes nodded and smiled, his gaze distant. "Yes," he replied. "I do suppose it will." He sighed and leaned back. "Do you know, Raffles, those children are what we're fighting for. There's a whole universe out there, waiting, and some day those young men and women will be out there, finding the strange things and bringing them to light." He closed his eyes a moment, then, with a swift movement, stood up out of his chair. "Come on, then. It's fallen to us, my old adversary, to prepare them for their task. 

"The game's afoot."

* * *

The room was a place of polished chrome and steel, eerily lit by a strange luminescence that emanated off the walls. A soft symphony of humming electronics filled the air.

In the middle of the room was a large rotating chair. It was empty as Harry and the others entered the room. They stopped, glancing around them in confusion.

The past weeks had been busy ones for them. Most of it had been the training. There had been classes, tactics sessions, even several nerve-wracking simulated combats in a strange machine called a 'Danger Room'. They had learned the secret history of the world, the silent masters and cold warriors who watched and pulled strings in the darkness and slid behind the scenes to cover-up things best left out of the light. They had learned about the task that faced them, in this day, and the secret struggles that men like Holmes and Dumbledore had waged, for almost a century.

They _knew_, now, what they had to do. Standing there, in that sterile-looking room, wondering what it was that they had been called here for, Harry, Hermione, Ron and Ginny looked at each other, and each of them wondered: did any of the others feel as uneasy as he or she did, facing this task?

Behind them, the door irised open, and a woman came in. She stood, watching them, her eyes alert. There was a strange, poised grace to her movements, almost as if she were _flowing_ through the air instead of merely moving.

Harry cleared his throat, nervously. The woman was small, barely a few inches above five feet. And beautiful. _Very_ beautiful. And wearing an olive-green unitard that left _very_ little to the imagination. He felt Ginny's elbow thud into his ribs, and realized that he'd been staring, slack-jawed.

"You'd be the new ones, then," she said. She seemed to be Cockney, and yet—there was a hint of the exotic to her accent, some inflection that none of the four young magic-users before her could quite place. "Call me Cammy."

"Uh, yeah," Harry heard himself say. "Hi. Hello. My name's Harry. Hi." Ron's own reply, to his ears, sounded even more unintelligible.

The corners of her mouth rose, slightly. She slid forward until she was looking at Hermione almost eye-to-eye. "And you? What do _you_ call yourself?"

Hermione regarded her coolly. "Hermione Granger," she replied. Her proffered handshake was almost painfully correct.

"Virginia Weasley," said Ginny. Unlike Hermione, she did not offer to shake the woman's hand.

Cammy stepped back, placing her hands upon her hips as she examined the four young wizards with what seemed to be an expert eye. "I expect you're here for the same reason I am, aren't you? 

"And that is…?" asked Hermione.

The smaller woman spread her hands. "I wouldn't know, really. _He'll_ probably tell us, when he comes."

"You mean Mr. Drake," said Harry.

Cammy nodded. She looked around. "Funny that he can stand it," she murmured, half to her self.

"That, Ms. White, is no surprise at all," said Drake from the doorway. He strode in, his strong gaze sweeping across the others present. "The power that this place once had is destroyed. I did that, with my own hands and my own mind. There is no Number Two, no robot balloons that think they are dogs." His voice grew quiet. "I can no longer—_never—_be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or _numbered_. _Never._" These last words were said with a vehemence that was almost frightening.

He glared round at the others a moment, then strode over to the chair. A panel across one of the arms slid open as he approached. Stooping over the chair, he tapped out a series of commands on the keypad the panel had revealed.

"I believe you've already gotten yourselves acquainted with Ms. White," he said to Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny. "She is here in her capacity as your supervisor."

"She's what?" cried Harry and Ron, almost in unison.

"Your supervisor," replied Drake. His expression was inscrutable. "It has been decided by the authorities above us that you four have learned enough to carry out your first mission. Ms. White, as I have noted, will be your supervisor." His voice grew deadly quiet. "I would advise you to follow any instructions she gives you very carefully. She has significantly more experience in the field than you do. I assume by now you are quite aware of the possible consequences of any mistakes you might make out there"

Harry eyed the woman dubiously. She seemed…capable, certainly. There was an air of calm competence about her. Still, he'd survived six years of sparring with the Dark Lord himself. Didn't _that_ count for something?

"I assume you'll have read the case files, Mr. Potter," said Drake, his voice dry. "Most certainly, my own. And Commander Bond's. And Mr. Snow's own account of his capture by the Four."

Harry swallowed, nervously, and nodded. There had been so many things, in those files, that had seemed so incredible that he found himself hardly able to believe them. 

Drake smiled, thinly. "I thought so." He tapped a final key on the pad. A large, flat screen descended from the ceiling, flickering to life as it came level with the party in the room.

"Now," said Drake. The image on the screen was of a small castle, perched high atop a forested mountain peak. In the distance, a peaceful alpine village could be seen. He gestured at the castle as he spoke. "Castle Bek. Ancestral home of the Counts of Bek since the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. The current count is somewhat of a scholar, one rather well-known in his chosen area of study." He turned to regard Harry, Ron, Hermione and Ginny.

"Tell me. How much do you know on the subject of antediluvian civilizations?"

"Uh," Harry struggled to call up once more long-forgotten notes over which he'd fallen asleep in History of Magic. "It's not my best subject," he admitted, after a while. "All I remember is that the first wizards appeared some time before Atlantis sank. They were supposed to have been part of the reason the island sank, or something. Some sort of war, I think, over some artifacts they had created."

"Hm," was Drake's only response. "Ms. Granger?"

Hermione glanced sideways at Harry. "Harry's got the basic points right, sir. We don't really know much about the history of magic beyond a few thousand years. Everything else is just legends." She frowned. "I'd heard there was something, though, a few years ago. They found something, in France, buried on a farm. A book—a _red_ book. It's supposedly a history of one of the first magical wars. Something about a ring…"

Drake nodded. "Yes. I'd heard of that myself. A new wrinkle in an already complicated human prehistory. The kingdom with which we concern ourselves, however, arose some while after the events you have just discussed took place. Have you heard of the Empire of Melniboné?"

"The Dragon Lords?" asked Ron. He seemed taken aback. "Bloody hell. The _Dragon Lords_? You're not saying they're real, are you?"

"Quite real, Mr. Weasley, quite real," replied Drake.

"Bloody hell." Ron's voice was a whisper. Beside Harry, Ginny was staring, wide eyed at the old man.

"B-but, they're only stories, aren't they? Mum used to tell us about them—to scare us. You mean they _are_ real?"

Drake smiled. "I believe, Ms. Weasley, that that was what I'd just said. Is there anything wrong, my dear?"

She shook her head. 

"In any event, Ms. Weasley, the Melnibonéans _did_ exist, the remnant of a once proud empire. They were every bit the great magicians of your mother's stories. Insane, too, from what we know of them—driven mad with bitter pride."

"Bloody Hell," muttered Ron. "And this von Bek—he studies _them_, doesn't he?" He laughed, then looked around at his friends. "It's another fairy-story come to life to bite us in the backsides—Hey!" He shrank away as Ginny and Hermione both swatted him upside the head.

"Perhaps," replied Drake, his features enigmatic. "To the best of our knowledge, however, the Melnibonéans are extinct. The islands from which they held sway are at the bottom of the sea. For those who would find them, however, their artifacts remain. And, yes, Count von Bek is one of the preeminent researchers in the world today on the culture of the Melnibonéan Empire.

"Up until a few days ago," Drake continued, "the Count had in his possession several valuable manuscripts of the Empire. They were stolen, four nights ago, while the Count was down in the village below his castle."

"Stolen?" asked Harry. "I see, sir, but what has this got to do with us?"

Drake raised an eyebrow. "Come now, Mr. Potter. Show me what you have learned. _You_ tell _me_."

Harry flushed. "I—uh." He paused mind racing. "I suppose—it could be used against us. There could be a spell written on them—one that Voldemort might want. The Melnibonéans—they were powerful magicians, weren't they?"

Drake nodded. "Very powerful, Mr. Potter," he agreed. "I would advise you to keep an open mind, however. There are other powers besides Voldemort who would covet these scrolls."

"Yes, sir," replied Harry. He gazed at the screen. The country around the castle seemed…tranquil. It was strange, he thought, to imagine this place the scene of a strange and occult battle. "What are we supposed to do?"

Drake turned to regard the screen as well. "You, Mr. Potter, and your friends, will interview the Count. The information in those scrolls is obviously important to whoever our enemy is. Find out what you can." He reached into his blazer and pulled out a dark leather folder. "Here. This file will tell you everything you need to know."

Harry took the folder. He stood, staring at it in his hands for a few moments. He felt…lost, somehow.

"Harry?" said Ron, from behind him.

He turned to regard his friends. "I'm all right, Ron. It's all right."

Ron placed a hand on Harry's shoulder. "Hardly like any of the things we've had to do before, is it, Harry?"

"No," replied Harry. "It isn't. It's much bigger." He looked round at them, wondering if they were feeling the same way he was. "We can do this, can't we?"

"Bit late for that, isn't it?" asked Ron. 

Harry laughed. "True."

Drake clapped him on the shoulder. "Believe, Mr. Potter. We have full confidence in you," he said. He looked round at the others crowded around Harry. "All of you."

Hermione was the first to break the silence that followed. "Well," she said, smiling. "I suppose we'll have to be getting ready to go, now."

Drake nodded. "Yes. I expect you do, Ms. Granger. I expect you do." He smiled. "Good luck, my young friends, and good hunting." He waved them towards the door.

As he reached the doorway, Harry turned. "Mr. Drake?"

The old man turned. "Yes, Mr. Potter?"

"Goodbye, Mr. Drake."

Smiling, the old man raised his thumb and forefinger, circled, to his eye. "Be seeing you, Mr. Potter. Be seeing you."


	6. Men of Shadow

Castle Bek stood among wooded hills that shone red and gold under a late autumn sky. Fallen leaves swirled about the castle courtyard as Cammy stepped out of the rental car, pulling her jacket about her.

"Come on, you lot," she said to the others in the car. "There's work to be about."

Harry was already half-out of his seatbelt. He swung his door open and stepped out, shrugging his long coat more comfortably about his shoulders as he did so, and looked round.

A late afternoon sun shed golden light across the castle's weather-beaten stones. Across the courtyard, the door to the great hall stood open. A rusty sign written in German with large black letters hung above the lintel.

Harry froze. For a moment, it seemed to him as if the sun dimmed, and a shadow fell across the yard for a few moments. The sounds of mad, frightened gibbering brushed across the edge of his consciousness, and fell silent.

"My God," he whispered. He looked round. Ron was trying to help Hermione out of the car. She raised a questioning eyebrow at his outstretched arm, before stepping easily out of the vehicle, elbowing him gently in the ribs as she walked past him.

Ginny came up behind him. "Harry?" she asked.

He started. "Ginny! I-it's all right. I'm fine, really." He placed his hand over hers and smiled at her.

Cammy led them down a narrow passage between the hall and the walls of the castle compound. "The Count doesn't live in the castle proper. Back when the Soviets took over the place they converted it into a mental hospital. He came back here from Canada when the Wall fell and took up residence in that tower." She pointed to a tall pile of stone, rising up from the rear of the old hall. "Come on. His door's this way."

The door swung open as they approached. The man holding the door seemed young, though something about the way he carried himself suggested, like some of the older teachers at Hogwarts, manners learned in more genteel times. Red eyes scanned the group. Bone white eyebrows, invisible against equally pale skin, rose.

The man was an albino.

"May I help you?" he asked.

Cammy stepped forward. "Count von Bek?"

The man nodded. "I am Ulrik von Bek. And might I ask whom it is I have the honor of addressing?"

"Cammy White." She handed him a card embossed with a strange device that flashed in the sun—a man with a question mark in place of his head. "I'm with the League."

"Indeed? I had not expected to hear from your…employers since the end of the Second World War. Though perhaps I should have expected a visit, considering the events of the past week." He stepped back from the door. "Well," he said. "Today appears to be a day for visitors concerned for my loss. Come in. Perhaps one of you can shed light on whatever happened here."

As they filed into the small antechamber, the Count closed the door behind them. "I do seem to remember you, Ms. White. You took part in that prize-fighting tournament in South-East Asia, as I recall. The one that started the current vogue for such things."

Cammy coloured. "Y-yes. The Street Fighter tournament. I entered as a representative of the British government."

The Count nodded. "Indeed. Some of the stories told of that event seem hardly credible. Then again, Ms. White, people such as yourself deal in the impossible, don't you?" He turned to regard the others. "And your companions?"

The British agent indicated Harry with an outstretched arm. "This is Harry Potter, late of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Hermione Granger. And Ron and Ginny Weasley. Also former students of that school."

The Count shook hands with all of them. "So. The famous Harry Potter." It was Harry's turn to colour. "We've heard much of you and your adventures, Mr. Potter."

Harry's eyes widened in surprise. "You have? But—"

"But what happened to the vaunted secrecy that your Wizarding World so cherishes as its only defence against the…'Muggles'?" Von Bek shook his head. "Mr. Potter, for those of us who make it our business to deal with the strange, such things as your magical society, hiding all its wonder and its strange joys amidst the mundane, _are_ our business."

The nobleman turned to lead them up the stairs. "Come this way. I left the others upstairs inspecting my library. Perhaps you'd like to meet them. Or inspect my library for yourselves, as well. Or perhaps you'd like to do both. I have a suspicion that you'll find at least one group of my visitors today extremely interesting."

Reaching the first floor landing, the Count led them down a short hallway. Opening the door at the end, he ushered the group through, admitting them into a round, airy room. Bright light streamed in from large windows a quarter of the way around the outer walls.

Heavy shelves lined the walls. Some still held books—large, leather-bound tomes many pages thick, smelling of dust and old parchment. Others had been ransacked, the contents lying spilled upon the floor in a profusion of loose pages and broken spines.

There were three people in the room. Two men stood by either side of one of the windows, watching a bookish-looking girl leaf through scattered sheets of paper with an intense expression on her face. The men looked up as the group entered the room.

"Allow me to introduce my other guests," said the Count, picking his way across the paper-strewn floor. "Mr. Carl Corey is here at my request." He indicated the taller of the two. The man nodded. He was darkly handsome, with black hair and piercing grey eyes. A glint of light upon his lapel caught Harry's attention, and he looked at it.

A tiny silver pin, cast in the shape of a rose, winked at him in the afternoon sun. Harry's gaze rose to lock for a few brief moments with Corey's. He froze. The hideous babbling that had echoed in his head as he looked towards the tower rose anew, each inhuman syllable sending a jolt of panic through his consciousness.

He saw Corey's eyes widen, too. Then, they narrowed. Suddenly, the gibbering rose in pitch and tempo, climbing to an incoherent shriek before fading away, almost as abruptly as it had come.

"That's something very interesting you're carrying in there, Mr. Potter," he said quietly.

Harry stared. "How?" he began.

The corner of the the tall man's mouth twitched upwards. "I know these sorts of things, in my way." The humour vanished. "Perhaps, Mr. Potter, we need to discuss this later."

Harry looked up sharply. For a few moments, the two men stared at each other, Harry's gaze questioning, Corey's even and open. For just the briefest of moments, something flickered in Corey's eyes—something very old. Harry shuddered. By a supreme effort of will, he restrained himself from stumbling backwards. He nodded at the other man, briefly.

A strained silence followed. Awkwardly, Harry turned away, looking towards the other man in the room. He was tall as well, though slender and good-looking in a bookish way where Corey was rugged, intelligent eyes glinting behind a pair of horn-rimmed glasses.

"Nakajima?" Harry looked round. Cammy was staring coolly at the man. The fingers of her left hand caressed the knuckles of her left. "They didn't tell us the Library was getting involved in this."

Nakajima raised an eyebrow. "We weren't informed that the League was involving itself either. I wonder—what interest does the League have in a parcel of stolen books?"

Ron leaned in to whisper in Harry's ear. "_Y'know, Harry, I think they know each other from somewhere._"

Hermione leaned in to add her own commentary. "_I don't know, but I think they could be from the _British _Library._" The other two looked at her uncomprehendingly, and she _tsk_-ed in annoyance. "_You know, the big round building in the Museum courtyard?_" Her tone was scathing.

"_But why?_" Harry began. He was beginning to wonder how many players there were in this whole mess.

Hermione shook her head. "_We're looking for stolen books, remember. I think—there were some reports I read. The Library's very concerned about stolen books too._" All three—and Ginny, who had been hovering at the edge of the little circle listening, turned to regard Nakajima.

The slender man nodded once to Cammy, as if signifying the end of their conversation, before turning to Harry and his friends.

"And you'd be the League's apprentice adventurers, wouldn't you?" he asked. "There's always a need for people like us. That's why organisations like ours always have their eyes out for new blood." The corner of his lip twitched upwards. "There's great adventures in the offing, young adventurers. Greater than any us old hands can lay claim to." He bowed. "Donny Nakajima. Special Agent Paper for the British Library." A slender hand indicated the young woman kneeling on the floor, who was now looking up curiously at the new arrivals, several sheets of trodden paper still in her hands. "And _my_ apprentice. Ms. Yomiko Readman."

The girl on the floor smiled, shyly and waved.

Corey cleared his throat. "Now that introductions are made, I'm curious to know what, if anything, your apprentice has found, Nakajima. If you don't mind."

The Count raised an eyebrow, then nodded. "Well. Indeed. Have you found anything, then, Ms. Readman?"

Yomiko looked up at her mentor. Nakajima shrugged, then nodded. "Well, you heard the man, Yomiko-chan. Tell us what you've found."

She blushed. "I-I'm sorry, Donny-_sensei_. The papers saw the thieves coming in, but they were wearing masks and robes. I couldn't see their faces."

Harry exchanged glances with Ron, Hermione and Ginny. _Could it be?_ Nervously he cleared his throat.

"Um, these men—were they carrying anything? How did they get in?"

The apprentice agent bit her lip, and looked once more at Donny Nakajima.

Harry caught the small, almost imperceptible nod that Nakajima sent his apprentice's way. Once more, Yomiko coloured.

"They used something to open the lock on the window. It made a sort of flash. I-I couldn't get a close look at it. It was something long."

Harry looked round at his friends once again. Slowly, he reached into his jacket pocket. "Was it something like this?" he asked, bringing out his wand. Behind him, he heard Ginny gasp. He went over to a desk by the wall. A key had been left in the keyhole of the drawer. He turned the key and pulled it out, placing it on the desk. Then, he pointed the wand at the lock. "_Alohomora,_" he said.

There was a flash, and a click, and the lock opened. "Was it anything like this, Ms. Readman?"

Her eyes lit up. "Yes! It was like that! Um—" She lapsed into silence again. Nakajima placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Hermione had been looking at the books still on the shelves. "_Old magic,_" she whispered to herself. She turned to the Count. "Uh, sir, exactly what sorts of books were taken?"

"Copies of several treatises dating to some centuries after the fall of Atlantis. A catalogue of various…_ancestral spirits_ known to the ancients. Texts on the binding and summoning of these entities."

Ron scratched his head. "I don't see that Voldemort would want anything with these books that he hasn't already got," he said, dubiously.

Von Bek's eyebrow's rose. "Ah? So it was he who broke in here, then?"

"It was probably only a group of his henchmen, sir," said Harry.

The nobleman smiled. "I understand that, yes. As to what he may have wanted with these texts…these books deal with beings far more primal—and far older—than even the Fallen. With whom, by the way, even your Dark Lord has more sense than to deal. No—it is possible that he feels he would, with the aid of these books, be far more able to control these creatures—and retain possession of his own soul—than he would making a bargain with the Fallen."

Into the silence that followed, Ron spoke. "J-just what kind of 'spirits' are you talking about?"

"There is a school of thought," von Bek replied, after a short pause, "that says they are the prototypes upon which the Creator based the spirits of the first Men."

"But how would he get power from that?" Hermione blurted.

"Well." There was another pause, a longer one this time. "You understand that the connections are very tenuous, and many may not agree with my assessment—there are too many cultural blind spots ingrained in many of my colleagues, and myself as well, if I'm honest." He took a deep breath. "It's an article of the Christian faith that Man is born in rebellion against his Creator. And given the stated goals and intentions of your Lord Voldemort—what better being to summon and bind to his will than the soul of one whose rebellion was old long before the Morningstar fell?"

Harry looked at him. The Count's words seemed an impossibility, and yet—for a moment, as his mind finally processed the meaning of the Count's last sentence, something rose in him, a distant, atavistic terror, and even as it faded, he wondered where it had come from.

And buried deep within his quaking mind, the alien seed that slumbered fitfully stirred once more, and an inaudible, inhuman whimper echoed through Harry's consciousness, and died away.

**Lucius**

"_Lucius_."

Lucius Malfoy did his best not to show his unease at the sound of his Lord's voice. The Dark Lord Voldemort had always been, in his estimation, a greater man in vision, if not stature, than the masses. A much greater man. Lucius had recognised that, when the Dark Lord's message first begun making its way through the Wizarding World. Being pure of blood that dated back to the magi of Etruria and the proud Republic of Rome, Lucius had understood the rightness of that message.

What Lucius understood even better, however, was how much more easy it was to traverse the path to greatness at the side of the already great. He was, after all, a son of Slytherin.

The thought flashed through his mind as he bowed to his master upon his throne. _What happens to the one who becomes more than great?_

The Dark Lord Voldemort, before his discorporation at the hands of a babe in arms, had been a commanding figure. In the years before his catastrophic attack upon the Potter home, his hair had started to go grey at the temples, combining with the aquiline, patrician features he'd been born with to add the air of an elder statesman to his already immense charisma. Even then, however, there had been something about him that unnerved those not familiar with him.

It had been whispered to Lucius that the strange unease that Voldemort spread in his wake had been the psychic residue of whatever unnatural arts the Dark Lord had acquired during his decades-long sojourn in the Orient. The thought had fascinated him.

He could see, now, what his master's arts had done to his soul. That visage would not inspire or enchant the weak of will to do his bidding now.

It would, Lucius thought, as he suppressed an excited shiver, do well to inspire _fear_. He schooled his features to calm. As much as power such as this, embraced by a will such as that of the Dark Lord Voldemort, fascinated him, it would not do, he reminded himself, to approach it with anything but respect.

"My Lord?" He bowed before his master.

Unblinking, ophidian eyes stared down at him. Slowly, transparent membranes crept across their surfaces before retracting out of sight. "Your son," he said, "is a fool, Lucius."

"My Lord, has he done anything to displease you?"

Bony hands reached down to where a massive cobra grovelled at the Dark Lord's feet. The creature tried to slink away. Voldemort's hands darted down, quicker even than the swiftest of his pets, and caught the cobra behind its head. "I required a book, Lucius," he said, lifting the terrified animal into his lap. "I sent your son for it. He was to have sent them back by portkey once he acquired them." Bony fingers rapped the serpent gently at the base of its skull. Lucius saw the muscles beneath the animal's skin twitch, as if in pain. The snake did not move, as if held by a fear greater even than death. "He found the book," the Dark Lord continued. "And it was sent back to me. The problem, Lucius, was that he found the wrong book!" Voldemort raised his hand and slammed it down upon the cover of a large tome resting on a table at his side.

Lucius tried very hard not to sweat. "I gave him clear instructions, My Lord. It would be impossible for him not to have mistaken the book for anything else."

Voldemort chuckled. It was not a pleasant sound. "A copy, Lucius—your son made away with a cheap copy, created using one of those accursed methods the Muggles so like to use. It has as much mystical power contained within it as a rock does."

"My most humble apologies, My Lord." Lucius bowed, again. "My son is often…overconfident, I'm afraid. Shall I instruct him to return and retrieve the original for you?"

The Dark Lord raised a hand. "No need. I have already instructed him myself. More clearly, this time. I rather doubt he will be making any such mistakes, now."

"I-if you say so, My Lord." This time, Lucius found himself unable to keep the uneasiness from showing. The Dark Lord leaned forward, his expression intent.

"Lucius, Lucius," he chided his subordinate. "Am I detecting fear in your voice? How long have you known me, now—has it really been thirty-five years?"

"Thirty-seven, My Lord."

Voldemort leaned back. "Ah, yes. That was when you had your duel with that fool Zatara. He was a danger to us, both in ability and in ideas."

"Indeed, My Lord. A pity it could not have ended more permanently."

"A pity, indeed," agreed Voldemort. He was growing more jocose. "Still, we no longer have interference from him and his ilk. Our plans proceed apace."

"They do, My Lord." Lucius paused. "I have learned that our enemies have recruited the Potter boy into their ranks."

Voldemort's brows rose. "Well. They seek him as a pawn, perhaps?" He paused, then shook his head. "No. Our opponents are too sentimental for that. The boy does have potential, after all. A pity he will never realise it."

"Indeed, My Lord." The snake was still motionless in Voldemort's arms, save for the occasional nervous twitch as the Dark Lord stroked it. Lucius' gaze wandered once more to the animal, noting again its size.

"I have him tamed well, Lucius," said Voldemort, noticing his henchman's interest. "He has an interesting history, though a long one. Perhaps I have told it to you?"

"I…cannot recall if you have, My Lord." Something tinkled in Lucius' coat. He reached inside and withdrew a pocketwatch. "I…fear I cannot stay, My Lord," he said, clicking the timepiece open and reading the dial. "I am expected to meet our allies in Los Angeles within the half-hour."

Voldemort waved a hand. "Go, then. Perhaps I shall tell you the tale of this new pet of mine when you return, eh?"

Lucius bowed. "I look forward to it, My Lord." He turned and strode back up the hall with the frightened hissing of Voldemort's new pet echoing in his ears.

He had just reached the door when the tone of the hissing changed, bringing him up short. Quickly, he glanced back to where his Lord sat. The snake was on the ground now, attempting to curl up on the dais as far away as it could from Voldemort's chair. On the back of the chair, Nagini, the Dark Lord's other serpent and his familiar, uncoiled langorously about her master's shoulders.

Lucius looked back at the strange tableau for a few seconds. Had he just heard _words_ in the hissing of the snake? He turned round and shook his head. It had probably been his imagination, he decided.

"_Once…was a man…_" Lucius whipped around. The scene behind him was as he had left it before, except…

The new snake was staring at him. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, Lucius thought, but it seemed to him as he stood there that the eyes of the snake were human, and filled with almost unbearable pain. Then, the moment passed, and he quickly turned and went out the door.

It had probably just been his imagination, after all.

**Draco**

Draco stared angrily up the hill at the castle he had broken into several nights ago with Crabbe and Goyle. The Dark Lord's stinging rebuke echoed in his mind. The lights were on in the tower windows, he noticed. Beside him, Crabbe and Goyle waited, ready for his command. Turning, he nodded. The three wizards began to climb the slope below the castle walls.

Draco fixed the tower window in his mind. The Muggle would be home, now. Draco looked forward to meeting him. He would make the man pay for fooling him like that.

Clenching his jaw and balling his hands into fists in determination, Draco Malfoy trudged up and onward. Yes, the man would pay.


End file.
